On the existence of root-initial-accenting suffixes: An elicitation study of Japanese -zu

Most known cases of affix controlled accentuation patterns involve local accent assignment: prefixes assign root-initial accents whereas suffixes assign root-final accents. In this article we document the nonlocal accentuation behavior of -zu, a recently emerged suffix in Japanese which an elicitation study reveals to be productively root-initial-accenting. We present a phonological analysis of the -zu data, showing that standard theories of morpheme realization predict the existence of such a suffix. The existence of -zu therefore fills what would otherwise be an undesirable typological gap.