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In his classical typological study Trubetzkoy (1969) proposed that natural languages fall into two groups, “mora languages” and “syllable languages,” according to the smallest prosodic unit that is used productively in that language. Tokyo Japanese is classified as a “mora” language whereas Modern English is supposed to be a “syllable” language. The mora is generally defined as a unit of duration in Japanese (Bloch 1950), where it is used to measure the length of words and utterances. The three words in (1), for example, are felt by native speakers of Tokyo Japanese as having the same length despite the different number of syllables involved. In (1) and the rest of this chapter, mora boundaries are marked by hyphens /-/, whereas syllable boundaries are marked by dots /./. All syllable boundaries are mora boundaries, too, although not vice versa.The notion of “mora” as defined in (1) is equivalent to what Pike (1947) called a “phonemic syllable,” whereas “syllable” in (1) corresponds to what he referred to as a “phonetic syllable.” Pike's choice of terminology as well as Trubetzkoy's classification may be taken as implying that only the mora is relevant in Japanese phonology and morphology. Indeed, the majority of the literature emphasizes the importance of the mora while essentially downplaying the syllable (e.g. Sugito 1989, Poser 1990, Tsujimura 1996b). This symbolizes the importance ... log in or subscribe to read full text