ITO AND MESTER TO THE EAST AND BEYOND

UCSC faculty Junko Ito and Armin Mester were in complementary distribution in Santa Cruz during the past two weeks, thanks to their travel schedules. Junko travelled first to the East (Boston, Mass), where she was an invited speaker at WAFL (Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics) at MIT on October 20th, and then Armin to the Far East (Tokyo, Japan), where he was an invited speaker at ICPP 2018 (International Conference on Phonology and Phonetics) at NINJAL (National Institute of Japanese Languages and Linguistics) on October 27th. In each of these venues, they presented their recent work on “Preaccentuation and tonal alignment,” which proposes a new version of the antepenultimate accent principle which defines the default location of pitch accent in Japanese. The chief innovation in this work is that accent in compounds with “short” second nouns (one or two moras—so-called “preaccentuation” at the end of the first noun) now follows from the same principle, as does the prototypical junctural N2-initial accent in compounds with “long” N2 (three to four moras), given a very simple extension of the analysis of unaccentedness in Japanese in Ito and Mester (2016, Linguistic Inquiry), a PDF of which can be accessed here.