Abstract While recent work has made it abundantly clear that the metrical foot is fundamental for any understanding of the accent pattern of Japanese and its dialects, other features of these pitch accent systems are directly linked to the constraints aligning tonal melodies with prosodic structure. This paper presents some results on the microvariation in the pitch accent systems of the dialects of Kagoshima Prefecture: the main Kagoshima City dialect, and the separate dialects of Koshikijima island and the southernmost Kikaijima island (Ryukyu archipelago). All these dialects, except for the Kagoshima City dialect, are in serious decline in terms of numbers of speakers. We show that the accentual microvariation in Kagoshima Japanese is due to a simple reranking of the basic constraints aligning the accentual melodies HL and H. The difference in tone-bearing unit between dialects (syllable- vs. mora-counting behavior), difficult to analyze as a parameter setting, follows from the ranking of constraints against tonal contours on moras and syllables.

中文翻译：

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鹿儿岛日语中的音高重音和音调对齐

摘要虽然最近的工作已经非常清楚地表明，对于任何了解日语及其方言的重音模式而言，格调脚都是至关重要的，但这些音高音系统的其他特征直接与将音调旋律与韵律结构对齐的约束条件联系在一起。本文就鹿儿岛县方言的音高重音系统的微观变化提出了一些结果：鹿儿岛市的主要方言，以及越谷岛和最南端的界岛岛（琉球群岛）的不同方言。除鹿儿岛市方言外，所有这些方言的数量都在急剧下降。我们显示，鹿儿岛日语中的重音微变是由于对重音旋律HL和H对齐的基本约束进行了简单的重新排序。