Loanword Accentuation in Tokyo Japanese

This paper examines the accentuation of English loanwords in Tokyo Japanese. Accentuation is one of the main issues in Japanese loanword phonology. Many studies on loanword accentuation in Tokyo Japanese have been conducted (McCawley 1968, Kubozono 1994, Labrune 2002, others) and most of them claim that the default accent is the accent on the syllable containing the antepenultimate mora (Ono 1991, Tanaka 1992, Katayama 1995, Kubozono 1995, Kubozono and Ohta 1998, others). However, the antepenultimate accent explains only about 50% of the corpus consisting of 1105 English loanwords in Tokyo Japanese collected for this study. The present study analyzes the location of accent and the pitch pattern of English loanwords in Tokyo Japanese in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT: Prince and Smolensky 1993). In this study, I will show two things: (i) the default loanword accent is English accent, i.e. the accent on the syllable stressed in English, and (ii) an English loanword has the antepenultimate accent, i.e. the accent on the syllable containing the antepenultimate mora, when it does not preserve the original English accent.