愛してる: 2 pitch accent patterns?


I think I've heard both あいしてる{LHHLL}:
([1](https://youtu.be/Ff1SN8u1mgI?t=1914),
[2](https://youtu.be/sHXg43rnqz0?t=387),
[3](https://youtu.be/oRCsy25ER64?t=241)) and あいしてる{HLLLL}:
([4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoxvObLi9Q8&t=524s)(this seems to be the
same person as 3 with a different pronunciation of the same word),
[5](https://youtu.be/AQ0HBSt7Hyo?t=815),
[6](https://youtu.be/MhC0rZiRAs4?t=195))

Are there any factors that determine which one is used? Or is it a case of
free choice?




aguijonazo makes lots of great points but I'd like to add in my thoughts.

I think the major thing that needs to be considered here is what is referred
to as おそ下がり (lit. "late dropping") in the literature, but personally I like to
think of as "accent blurring". My description of the phenomenon is that an
accent can be stretched out across multiple morae, and the key for it to sound
natural is that there is _both_ a slide up and a slide down in the pitch, and
they do not need to be accurately placed at all, in fact you can have the
slide down be multiple morae late and it can still sound fine as long as there
is a slide up.

Of course no one thinks about sliding up and down when speaking, this is more
of a physical phenomenon where you are trying to get high enough for an accent
and it just mechanically takes you time to do it, and as a result the timing
of going down becomes more relaxed. Often the sliding up happens due to some
extra emphasis or tension.

When the listener hears something like this they will automatically hear it as
the accent being in the "right spot" (aka the right place according to their
own pronunciation of the word, as long as that spot falls within the blur
radius).

  1. In the first link, you can sort of hear something happening late but it's actually

> あいしてる  
>  ／￣＼＿＿ (blurred)

and not

> あいしてる  
>  ＿￣＿＿＿ (which is how a true accent on い would sound)

So to me it actually "sounds"(= gets interpreted) like あ＼いしてる just with the
accent blurred. BTW this is a pretty tame instance as far as this phenomenon
goes, sometimes you get things blurred much more than this.

  2. In the second link, it seems like the same thing happening to me here, again with the degree of blurring being pretty minimal, and in addition in this case あいしてる occurs after こよなく which itself has an accent, causing the あいしてる to be terraced and as a result most people would probably not even notice unless they were told to listen for it.

  3. The third link sounds the most noticeable because the blur goes all the way to the て, but even in this case I interpret it as あ＼いしてる, aka it's within bounds of being able to move the accent all the way back to the あ. But IMO this degree of blurring is to the point that it is noticeable and might cause an audio director to ask for a retake if it was a professional recording of something serious, for example (not because it's wrong but just because they might want something better enunciated).

  4. As aguijonazo says, this variation is due to intonation, and is occurring due to the と which can cause words before it to have a raise towards the end.

Overall, this sort of おそ下がり/blurring is a _psycholinguistic_ phenomena and
therefore is a killer for the learners because it's not 1:1 with the actual
auditory pitch. But learning to interpret it properly is key to ensure your
mental representation of the accents is actually correct as opposed to a
representation which only interprets extremely well-enunciated pronunciations
correctly.

