The origins and mechanics of pitch accent in SJ compounds


For the past few months I've been researching pitch accent in Japanese off and
on, concentrating on trying to identify regularities in a phenomenon which is
nearly completely arbitrary.

I've not seen any research dealing with the genesis of pitch accent though. I
have seen a paper which I can't find at the moment which gives evidence that
in English loan words, the pitch drop often, but not always, correlates with
the primary stress in the source language. That seems like a reasonable origin
for pitch accent in English loans.

But it is clear that Sino-Japanese compounds, and not just native compounds,
exhibit pitch accent. The pitch accent on SJ compounds which share a character
can often differ:

> 感謝 kánsha 感心 kanshin
>
> 電気 dénki 電源 dengen
>
> 地下 chiká 廊下 rouka

Is there any regularity to how SJ compounds (and native words for that matter)
acquired pitch accent? A hypothesis of mine: did SJ compounds start off as
unaccented (平板) and then somehow develop accent as they become more common? Or
does some quality of the Chinese reading predict the resulting pitch accent?

Also, what are the rules which underlie pitch accent, particularly when
accented words are combined, or when prefixes (like 御) are affixed? I already
understand that particular endings, such as -通り have a "de-accenting" quality
which removes any accents on the words to which it is affixed. What other
regularities exist?

_EDIT_ : One more question: Martin's "Reference Grammar of Japanese" gives the
pitch accent of 故 as yúé (in his notation). I didn't think a word could
possess two stresses — is this what he intended to notate?




Finding some method in this madness was actually part of eminent linguist
Haruhiko Kindaichi's 1951 Ph.D. thesis. Kindaichi found a perfect
correspondence between Chinese tones and pitch accent of Japanese _kango_.
However, it was not with the Tokyo accent that is now standard and taught in
textbooks, but the Heian period court accent.

Kindaichi found that one Heian period dictionary, called the _Ruiju myōgishō_
, contained not only the four Chinese tones in use at the time, but also
marked the corresponding Japanese accents. The perfect correspondence is shown
as follows:

[NOTE: L=Level, R=Rising, G=Going (often "departing"), E=Entering. Source:
["Pitch-accent of standard-Japanese"]](http://hdl.handle.net/10722/32991)
![From Lai, Yuk-wah, Esther, "Pitch-accent of standard-Japanese", 1983
dissertation](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NBEUf.png)

The court intellectuals of the Heian period who were pronouncing the Buddhist
terms found in the _Ruiju myōgishō_ would have been familiar with the Chinese
tones and regulated their speech accordingly. Obviously, this was never the
case for the general public. While the categories found in the _Myōgishō_ are
still generally adhered to today, the formation of the Tokyo accent would have
transformed the resulting pitch accents according to its own rules, for
example:

> In Tokyo, the first syllable is always low pitch unless the syllable is
> accented.

Source: Shimabukuro, Moriyo, [A reconstruction of the accentual history of the
Japanese and Ryukyuan languages
](http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/3039)

