Mora sensitivity in Kagoshima Japanese: Evidence from no contraction

要旨

Japanese has a productive process of no contraction by which no is contracted to the coda nasal -n in several contexts in colloquial speech: e.g.bakemono bakemon 'monster'.This paper discusses how this morphological process is constrained by phonological structure in Kagoshima Japanese, a southern variety of Japanese whose prosodic structure is supposed to be based entirely on the syllable, not the mora.It is concerned specifically with the contraction of the genitive particle no in such words as haruo-no ie ( haruo-n ie) 'Haruo's house'.Looking at how three native speakers of Kagoshima Japanese produce the genitive particle in various phrases, the paper shows that the morphological process is blocked if it would yield a superheavy syllable in the output.It also demonstrates that the process often triggers shortening of the preceding long vowel.Furthermore, the same process triggers resyllabification of three-mora strings that would otherwise constitute trimoraic syllables.All these phenomena can be accounted for by the putatively universal constraint banning superheavy syllables.This generalization not only reinforces the view that superheavy syllables are avoided in Japanese, but also demonstrates that the notion of the mora is indispensable for the description of Kagoshima Japanese, which was previously thought to be a quantity-insensitive language.

主題