Blurb:

The issue that I take up in this paper is the cross-linguistic variation in the number of prosodic levels, focusing on the case of Japanese. Some previous work on Japanese intonation, including those on J-ToBI and XJToBI, has not posited an Intonational Phrase (IntP), a level above a Major Phrase and below an Utterance (Beckman and Pierrehumbert, 1986; Pierrehumbert and Beckman, 1988; Maekawa et al., 2002; Venditti, 2005). However, it has been proposed that an IntP plays a role in many other languages  for example, in Italian, an IntP defines a domain of spirantization (Nespor and Vogel, 1986: 205211); in English, an IntP is signaled by socalled ‘comma intonation’ with a distinct pause and boundary tones (Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 2005).