Word-Prosodic Typology and the Traps of False Similarity: Japanese and Slovene

Abstract

The article briefly describes the historical development of language prosodic typology, introduces the two word-prosodic prototypes proposed by Hyman, and explains the positioning of pitch-accent languages on the lexical level. It points out the false similarity between Japanese and Slovene that was created with the introduction of the feature [±culminative] and proposes to expand it with the feature [±eliminative], which phonetically justifies the difference between pitch-accent systems and the stress-accent prototype.