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From: Mark Barton <mbarton@icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp>
Subject: Re: "pitch accent" vs. "tone"
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In article <jcoyne.824485134@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> J. Coyne,
jcoyne@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu writes:
>Subject: Re: "pitch accent" vs. "tone"
>From: J. Coyne, jcoyne@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu
>Date: 16 Feb 96 15:38:54 GMT
>>Gary Bjerke <garyb> writes:
>
>>Several linguistics books I have looked at, as well several Japanese grammar 
>>books, classify Japanese as a "pitch accent" language with two tones. Other
>>books refer to "tone languages", the canonical examples being various dialects
>>of Chinese and Vietnamese. The books that talk about "tone languages" tend not
>>to talk about Japanese in the sections that discuss Chinese, while the books
>>that talk about "pitch accent" tend to group Japanese with Norwegian and
>>Swedish as examples of limited pitch accent, and then go on to compare with
>>Chines dialects as a more extreme example of the use of tone.
>
>>What distinction - if any - do linguists make between "pitch accent" and
>>"tone"?
>>It seems to me that these represent two extremes of the same phenomenon, as
>>compared to "stress accent". So, are "pitch accent languages" the same as "tone
>>languages? And is there a controversy over how to classify Japanese?
>
>In Japanese, pitch can change the meaning of a sentance, but rarely the 
>meaning of a word.
>
>example : tabeta. (no pitch change)  = I ate
>	  tabeTA (rising pitch) = Have you eaten?
>
>This is a pitched language, the way most (all) western languages are.

Well Japanese is certainly not tonal, but it's not much like English
either.  
Firstly, although a rising intonation does do things like turn statements 
into questions, the end of a sentence is normally the only place that you 
get this effect.  The intonation pattern of most of the sentence is 
determined by the intonation patterns of the individual words plus some 
combining rules.  Contrast this with English where you often have very 
little pitch change except on _important_ words (like "important").  
Japanese tends to use specific sentence patterns to convey stress.  Also 
the pitch in English can change in the middle of a syllable, whereas in
Japanese it changes between syllables.

>Tonal languages can have a pitch change change a whole word.
>
>In chinese (which I dont know, so someone who knows it correct this part)
>they have a sentance/proverb/idiom that reads something like this :
>
>ma ma ma ma ma ma ma.     All of those have different tones (rising, 
>falling, flat, rise fall rise, etc (I dont know which is which.))
>
>The sentance is something about a horse. I dont really remember.  But the 
>point is that the individual words changed meaning with the pitch. 
>drastically.  wheras pitch in Japanese only changes the context (question 
>or statement)

Although the influence of pitch is not nearly as pervasive as in Chinese, 
it can affect meaning.  Among many pairs of words which are distinguished 
only by intonation is "hashi" meaning either chopsticks or bridge.  A
more 
realistic example that caught me personally was "mou ippai" meaning
either 
"another drink" or "already full".

Cheers,

Mark B.
