ITO AND MESTER IN THE LINGUISTIC REVIEW

The latest issue of The Linguistic Review—Volume 36, Number One— has just appeared in print. It is a special issue, edited by Haruo Kubozono, which is devoted to Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces in Japanese and Korean and its lead article is `Pitch Accent and Tonal Alignment in Kagoshima Japanese’ by Junko Ito and Armin Mester. The paper (which is available here), examines patterns of microvariation in the pitch accent systems of dialects of Japanese spoken in Kagoshima Prefecture. It argues that the apparently very complex patterns of variation can be understood in terms of the relative ranking in the various microdialects of the basic constraints governing the distribution of two accentual melodies (HL and H).