Abstract
This paper examines the nature and behavior of secondary H(igh) tones in Koshikijima Japanese, a highly endangered dialect spoken on three small, remote islands in the south of Japan. This dialect generally has a mora-counting prosodic system with two distinctive accent types/classes (Type A and Type B), and displays two H tones, primary and secondary, in words of three or more moras: The primary H tone appears on the penultimate and final moras in Type A and Type B, respectively, whereas the secondary H tone occurs at the beginning of the word redundantly.
Koshikijima Japanese displays regional variations with respect to the secondary H tone, particularly regarding its domain/position, its (in)dependence on the primary H tone, its interaction with the syllable, and its behavior in postlexical phonology. This paper examines how the secondary H tone behaves differently in three distinct accent systems of the dialect: (i) the system described by Takaji Kamimura eighty years ago, (ii) the one that is found quite extensively on the islands today, including Kamimura’s native village (Nakakoshiki) and Teuchi Village, and (iii) the system observed in Kuwanoura Village today. Comparing the three accent systems, this paper also proposes historical scenarios to account for the different behaviors of the secondary H tone across time and space.
Funding statement: The work reported in this paper is based on collaborative fieldwork with Zendo Uwano, Nobuko Kibe, Akiko Matsumori, Tomoyuki Kubo, and Tetsuo Nitta. It was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 26244022, 16H06319 and 17K18502 as well as the NINJAL collaborative research project ‘Cross-linguistic studies of Japanese prosody and grammar’.
References
Breteler, Jeroen. 2013. A Stratal OT analysis of the intonation of Japanese dialects with multiple intonational classes. Master’s thesis, Utrecht University.Search in Google Scholar
Haraguchi, S. 1977. The tone pattern of Japanese: An autosegmental theory of tonology. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.Search in Google Scholar
Hirayama, Teruo. 1951. Kyūshū hōgen onchō no kenkyū [Studies on tone in Kyushu Dialects]. Tokyo: Gakkaino Shishin-sha.Search in Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. 1977. On the nature of linguistic stress. Studies in Stress and Accent (Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics 4. 37–82.Search in Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. 2006. Word-prosodic typology. Phonology 23. 225–257.10.1017/S0952675706000893Search in Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. 2007. Universals of tone rules: 30 years later. In T. Riad & C. Gussenhoven (eds.), Tones and tunes, Vol. 1: Typological studies in word and sentence prosody, 1–34. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110207569.1Search in Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. 2017. Comments on Kubozono’s talk ‘Secondary high tones in Koshikijima Japanese’. JK Satellite Workshop on ‘Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces in Japanese and Korean’, held at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, October 11.Search in Google Scholar
Kamimura, Takaji. 1937. Koshikijima hōgen no kenkyū [A study of the Koshikijima dialect]. Mantetsu Kyōiku Kenkyūsho Kenkyū Yōhō 11. 319–348.Search in Google Scholar
Kamimura, Takaji. 1941. Koshikijima hōgen no akusento [The accent of the Koshikijima dialect]. Onseigaku Kyōkai Kaihō 65/66. 12–15.Search in Google Scholar
Kubozono, Haruo. 2012a. Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese. The Linguistic Review 29. 109–130.10.1515/tlr-2012-0005Search in Google Scholar
Kubozono, Haruo. 2012b. Varieties of pitch accent systems in Japanese. Lingua 122(13). 1395–1414.10.1016/j.lingua.2012.08.001Search in Google Scholar
Kubozono, Haruo. 2012c. Kagoshima-ken Koshikijima hōgen no akusento [The accent of Koshikijima Japanese]. Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan 16(1). 93–104.Search in Google Scholar
Kubozono, Haruo. 2016. Diversity of pitch accent systems in Koshikijima Japanese. Gengo Kenkyu 150. 1–31.Search in Google Scholar
Kubozono, Haruo, Zendo Uwano, Nobuko Kibe, Tomoyuki Kubo, Akiko Matsumori, & Tetsuo Nitta. 2016. Koshikijima Dialect Accent Database. http://koshikijima.ninjal.ac.jp/ accessed in May 2018.Search in Google Scholar
Liberman, Mark, & Alan Prince. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 249–336.Search in Google Scholar
McCawley, James D. 1978. What is a tone language? In V. Fromkin (ed.), Tone: A linguistic survey, 113–131. New York: Academic Press.10.1016/B978-0-12-267350-4.50009-1Search in Google Scholar
Uwano, Zendo. 1999. Classification of Japanese accent systems. In Shigeki Kaji (ed.), Cross-linguistic studies of tonal phenomena: Tonogenesis, typology and related topics, 151–186. Tokyo: ILCAA.Search in Google Scholar
Uwano, Zendo. 2012. Enu-kei akusento towa nani ka [What is an N-pattern accent?]. Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan 16(1). 44–62.Search in Google Scholar
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston