Pitch Accent of していない?

3 comments

1. Pitch changes in conjugation. I don’t know much about pitch accent, but I believe all I-adj. have the accent on the second to last mora (which ~ない is essentially, as it conjugates like that).

2. I believe that, when suffixes (like 語 or 人 in 日本語 or 日本人) or auxiliary verbs (補助動詞) attach to the “core word”, the pitch of the “core word” (in this case 日本) will change.

   Upon a very nitty gritty linguistic examination, our “core word” する is heiban, but it conjugates to し. て is a particle that connects to し, so the pitch follows し (平板型) and therefore jumps up. いる acts as a 補助動詞, which is why the pitch doesn’t drop back down for い but rather continues the high pitch of して. The pitch stays high until it reaches the final true word (単語) in this 文節 (bunsetsu) — ない, which is 頭高型.

   You may want to shift your thinking from していない as one word to していない as one 文節 but four 単語. In the grand scheme of Japanese learning, it’s not really important why the pitch is the way it is (you can just look at OJAD and learn the pitch), but if you really want to know, you can view it through the lens of 単語 and it will make much more sense.

3. OJAD is not infallible and particularly prone to errors with phrase-level accent. In this case, it might be confusing adjective rules with verb rules. いない (and thereforeしていない) is properly heiban, and that can be heard in pronunciation examples on forvo: https://forvo.com/word/%E3%81%84%E3%81%AA%E3%81%84/#ja

   Edit to clarify: ない as an adjective and ない as attached to verbs have different pitch accent rules.