Haruo Kubozono - Word and Sentence Prosody: The Endangered Dialect of Koshikijima Japanese

Phonology and Phonetics

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Volume

ISBN 9783110735055

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110730074

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110730128

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

This book is dedicated to the memory of three people who would have been very pleased with its publication:

Yoshiharu Kubozono

19281997

Nobuko Kubozono

19302017

Hiromi Kubozono

19612012

My research on Japanese prosody started with my work for a doctoral dissertation at the University of Edinburgh back in 19831986. I benefited greatly from the course work that I received in my first year, taught by John Laver, Sandy Hutchison, Alan Kemp, Jody Higgs, Jonathan Harrington, and Steve Hiller. My basis as a phonologist was cultivated in this first year in Edinburgh. After the course work, I was fortunate enough to have Bob Ladd as my supervisor from my second year. His enthusiastic supervision determined the course of my academic life since then. Following his advice, I first worked on word accent and intonation in standard Tokyo Japanese and completed my dissertation on the topic in 1987. This dissertation was the very beginning of my forty-year-long research on Japanese prosody. After coming back to Japan in 1986, I expanded the scope of my research to regional Japanese dialects, including my native dialect of Kagoshima Japanese and its sister dialect, Koshikijima Japanese. The latter is an endangered southern dialect and the main target of this current book. The book as a whole is an outcome of the fieldwork that I have carried out on these southern dialects for the past thirty years or so.

My work on Japanese prosody in the past forty years has been influenced through the discussions and collaborations with many people including, among others, Anne Cutler, Carlos Gussenhoven, Shosuke Haraguchi, Larry Hyman, Junko Ito, Nobuko Kibe, Tomoyuki Kubo, Bob Ladd, Akiko Matsumori, Armin Mester, Tetsuo Nitta, Shinichi Tanaka, Zendo Uwano, and Tim Vance.

Like other books of the same kind, this volume could not have been published without the help of many people and organizations. First, I would like to thank the informants of my fieldwork in Kagoshima and Koshikijima, especially Akiko and Kenji Ando, Setsuko and Yasuo Hanamure, Toshio and Kenichi Kawashima, Hiromi and Nobuko Kubozono, Chiriko and Toshifumi Megurida, Eizo Megurida, and Zenzo Nagata. I would also like to thank Bob Ladd for reviewing my draft very carefully and providing invaluable comments. I should not forget to thank Donna Erickson for checking the English of the draft as well as Ai Mizoguchi and Ryuichi Taki for checking its format. As for funding, my special thanks go to the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) for their generous support to the collaborative research project, Cross-Linguistic Studies of Japanese Prosody and Grammar, which I have led for the past six years (20162022). Funding from the Japanese government (KAKENHI 19H00530, 20H05617) was also indispensable for my fieldwork. I would also like to express my appreciation to the series editor, Aditi Lahiri, and the publishers editors, Birgit Sievert and Michaela Gbels, for their support and advice at every important phase of this publication.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to my family Keiko, Yuka, Naoya, and Ayaka for supporting me throughout my academic life.

Haruo Kubozono

compound accent

declarative (particle)

genitive (particle)

high (tone)

primary H tone

secondary H tone

Kagoshima Japanese

Koshikijima Japanese

low (tone)

primary L tone

secondary L tone

mora

first member of compounds

second/final member of compounds

nominative (particle)

question particle

syllable

Sino-Japanese

topic particle