71949
I have been studying pitch accent for a few months now, primarily from the NHK
Accent Dictionary. My Japanese is not terribly strong, so it took me a while
to muddle through the explanations and figure out all the appendices -
counters, compound nouns, auxiliaries, etc. - but I got there in the end.
However, there is one thing that is just completely stumping me: honorifics,
as in 〜さん, ～さま, 〜ちゃん, 〜君, etc.

I searched the internet multiple times, unsuccessfully. I have searched
through every location in the book and I can't find anything. The only other
thing that I can't see detailed in the book is case particles, but I
understand how they work. I ended up putting several names+honorific into the
Suzuki-kun Prosody Tutor and observing that they _seem_ to work as particles.
After discovering that, I did manage to find this:

'For instance, the very important endings ～さん, ～ちゃん, and ～さま behave like most
particles. The pitch does not change. If the name is 頭高型, it still is with
them. With 君, there is typically no change, but if the name is 平板型, the
resulting phrase may become 尾高型. Lastly, titles tend to be accented, but they
don't have to be when the surname is accented.'
(<https://www.imabi.net/pitch.htm>)

However, there's no source and no corroboration from anywhere else. Can
anybody confirm this or possibly point me in the direction of official
sources?
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2019-09-20T09:04:38.527
71942
2019-09-20T13:35:36.890
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question
names honorifics pitch-accent
Pitch Accent for Honorifics
I have just checked the matter in my _Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and
Phonology_ , Chapter 11 ‘The Phonology of Japanese Accent’ (as it describes,
say, the prosody of [氏]{し} or [家]{け} suffixes, it would perhaps be and
interesting read to you as well). It refers to the following two primary
sources:

  1. The MIT dissertation by William J. Poser, 1984: **The phonetics and phonology of tone and intonation in Japanese**. It is not available officially, but, luckily, Mr. Poser has provided [the complete text](https://www.academia.edu/2667912/The_phonetics_and_phonology_of_tone_and_intonation_in_Japanese) on his Academia.edu page! Unfortunately, it has nothing to say exactly on the matter under question.

  2. Timothy J. Vance 1987 book, **An introduction to Japanese phonology**. It is probably accessible somewhere... except Amazon purchase by an unreasonable price... and might contain the solution.

However, S. E. Martin with his **A reference grammar of Japanese** has
probably answers to everything, and, sure enough, now it does. Right on page
1056!

> The most general title for people is さん, a shortening of the formal version
> さま; there are also hypocoristic (endearing) versions ちゃん and ちゃま. Though
> often written with a hyphen, as if attached as a suffix, this title -
> variously translated as 'Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms,...' <...> - **has no affect on
> the accent of the word with which it forms a phrase** (emphasis mine); thus
> it is a syntactic reduction (with obligatorily dropped juncture) and is best
> treated as a separate word, a "reduced title": [さとうさん]{HLLLL}/[さま]{LL},
> [やまださん]{LHHHH}/さま{HH}, [ハルポマルクスさん]{LHHHLLLLL}/[さま]{LL} 'Mr Harpo Marx',
> [よしこちゃん]{HLLLLL}/[ちゃま]{LLL} 'little Miss Yoshiko', [けんちゃん]{HLLLL}/[ちゃま]{LLL}
> 'our Ken'.... <...> The title san can be followed by the collectivizer たち
> (§2.7): [やまださんたち]{LHHHHHL} (also [やまださんたち]{LHHHLLL}?)...

Here conversion to SE-accepted accent notation is mine.

Furthermore, the classic by Eleanor Harz Jorden, et al., **Japanese: The
spoken language** (1987) spenda a lot of time on accent and might cover it.
Vol. 1, page 26, its introduction as **-Sañ** (accentless) points at the same.

TL/DR: assume that -さん and its relatives do not alter the accent of word (if
existed, retains at the same place, if was absent, also absent). It MAY be
accented due to further affixation (such as with たち) and (possibly) there are
exceptions.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-09-20T12:36:17.163
71949
2019-09-20T13:35:36.890
2019-09-20T13:35:36.890
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answer