The Mora Obstruent /Q/ as an Emphatic in Japanese

要旨

Introduction: Modern Japanese (ModJ) is a pitch accent language and its basic unit is the mora. Anaccented mora carries a high tone, with the subsequent mora carrying a low tone. According to Kubozono (1989), morae can, on the basis of this tone distinction, be further subdivided into syllabic and non-syllabic, the former capable of bearing a high tone, the latter not. Non-syllabic morae incapable of bearing a high tone can be further sub-divided into four types (hyphens indicate moraic boundaries): (a) the second mora of a long vowel,e.g. the final mora in /ku-u/', eat'; (b) the second mora in a sequence of two vowels, butonly when the high front vowel /i/, e.g. the final mora in /sa-i/', rhinoceros'; (c) the moranasal, generally notated in the literature as /N/, e.g. /ka-N-ta-N/, 'easy'; and (d) the mora obstruent, generally notated as /Q/ in the literature, e.g. /wa-Q-tya-Q-ta/, '(I've etc.) gone and smashed (it)'. The mora nasal /N/ and the mora obstruent /Q/ may be referred to collectively as the (non-syllabic) mora consonants.The goal of this paper is to examine the role of the mora obstruent /Q/ in expressing emphasis in the modern language and, additionally, to speculate on the accuracy of the belief amongst some scholars that the phoneme's genesis lies in the sound changes triggered by borrowing from Chinese in the late Old Japanese (OJ) and Early Middle Japanese periods. Before doing so, however, I will outline the /Q/ phoneme's distribution within the ModJ phonetic system in §2 below, and then consider the sources of the phoneme in general in §3. The phoneme's role as an emphatic will be discussed in §4.

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