Boundary pitch movements (BPMs) are tones that occur at the end of the prosodic phrases in Japanese and contribute to the pragmatic interpretation of the utterance, such as questioning, continuation, and emphasis. The present paper investigated pitch range control of BPMs, which has been little studied in previous works. Specifically, it examined whether downstep is observed in BPMs through the analysis of Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. The results revealed that ordinal downstep was not found in BPMs, and that pitch range control of BPMs differed across their types. The results suggest that currently accepted frameworks of Japanese intonation cannot deal with pitch range control of BPMs.

Index Terms: downstep, pitch range, boundary pitch movement