Talk:Downstep (phonetics)

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I think references would be a good thing to add. — mark ✎ 07:52, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

+1... I need these references, there's some interesting stuff in that article.

[edit] Confusion of phenomena

The page starts out well, but then confuses downstep with accent, the case in Japanese. FOr more on downstep, cf. the chapter on African tone systems in Moira Yip's excellent book Tone (Cambridge). Japanese accent is a shift from H to L, downstep is a lowering of the F0 range used to express all of the tones.

There may not be any difference. Some linguists analyze Japanese pitch accent as downstep. Of course, the results aren't the same as in Bambara, for there you have downstep in an already tonal system, whereas Japanese is not a tonal language. (At least not in this analysis.) But feel free to add from Yip (who unfortunately paid scant attention to African languages in that volume). kwami 07:08, 26 September 2007 (UTC)