On the interplay between pitch accent and devoicing in Standard Japanese


  1. A claim regularly cited is that for younger speakers, devoicing and pitch accent are orthogonal features; i.e. the accent kernel is not shifted away from devoiced morae and neither is devoicing prevented by the presence of an accent kernel. **If I see myself as part of this cohort, is it advisable to try and acquire a pitch accent system where these two features are orthogonal?**

  2. _吹く_ and similar verbs are, from what I can see, uncritically described as either 頭高 or 尾高 by all dictionaries (which is to say, both patterns are given without qualifications and with purported equal viability). My view is that such verbs are 起伏式 and that, e.g. ふく{HL} is the default realization while the 尾高 realization is only possible if (1) the ふ is situationally devoiced, and (2) the speaker is a "devoicing-shifts-kernel"-type speaker (which are in the majority AFAICT but the condition is still necessary). **Is this view accurate?**

  3. I have found that I seem to unconsciously "reverse-engineer" the effects devoicing has on pitch accent; _四季_ , for instance, always sounds like 頭高 to me even when it "surfaces" as 尾高 when pronounced devoiced by a "devoicing-shifts-kernel"-type speaker. I would even go as far as to posit that a hypothetical genuine 尾高 pronunciation of _四季_ would be better-than-chance discriminable from the situationally arising "devoice-shifted-頭高" pronunciation, but this is beyond the scope of this thread. However, this intuition has also led me astray, I assumed e.g. _口々_ to be 頭高 (I have never heard it undevoiced) which was disproved by the NHK accent dictionary which only records it as 中高. Shifting the accent kernel due to devoicing is non-injective, so there is always some ambiguity as long as only one (kind of) data point is available. Some of these ambiguities can be resolved by class membership (which explains that e.g. _ぷかぷか_ is only truly 頭高) and other higher level pitch accent concepts, but none of these apply to _口々_ AFAICT. **When a native speaker hears an unknown word (to which no pitch accent constraint pertains) with the accent locus immediately following a devoiced mora, do they always perceive the "underlying" accent to be exactly on the mora they heard it on or do they also unconsciously reverse-engineer the accent to some degree?** This could be tested by asking them to recite the word without devoicing and observing whether they shift the accent or not. When it comes to my own personal, non-native intuition, this kind of reverse-engineering primarily (exclusively?) happens for [2]-words, either because [2]-中高-words are statistically less common than later 中高-words or, more plausibly, because [2]-words where the first mora is devoiced have an overall pitch shape that is very similar to that of 頭高 words.

