Japanese words are either accented (HL tonal melody: H | a m L | e ‘rain’ ) or unaccented (H tonal melody: a m H | e ‘candy’). Whereas the locus of accent (i.e. mora that bears H tone before a L tone, represented henceforth by acute accent) is lexically determined in native and Sino-Japanese nouns (e.g. híru ‘leech’; hirú ‘noon’), in loanwords it is predictable enough to suggest a grammatical e...

One of the major findings of the recent linguistic research on Japanese is that the syllable plays a pivotal role in a variety of phonological and morphological phenomena in the mora-based prosodic system of this language. This paper attempts to reinforce this argument by proposing a significant generalization of Japanese accentuation in terms of ‘syllable weight’, an idea that each syllable ha...

This study is the first investigation of the effects of regional accent on temporal organization, specifically of vowel duration, in stressed syllables in standard Italian. We examine possible compression effects on the duration of stressed vowels according to word-position (final, penult and antepenult) and syllable type (open vs. closed) in central v. southern varieties of (standard) Italian....

In many languages, loss of an underlying vowel results in stress patterns which are atypical for the language as a whole. For example, in Bedouin Hijazi Arabic (Al-Mozainy 1981, Al-Mozainy et al. 1985, McCarthy 1999), syncope of /a/ in an open antepenult creates words with stress on a light (CV) penult rather than the antepenult, the typical pattern for words with a light penult: underlying //i...