Postlexical Tonal Neutralizations in Kagoshima Japanese

要旨

On the basis of original fieldwork, this article examines aspects of postlexical tonal neutralizations in Japanese by analyzing how postlexical processes affect lexical tonal patterns and how postlexical tonal neutralizations can (or cannot) lead to a loss of lexical contrasts. Its main focus is on Kagoshima Japanese, a southern Japanese dialect with two lexical tonal classes (Types A and B), and specifically, on its question and vocative (calling) intonation. This dialect does not show any tonal neutralization at the lexical level at least in its traditional system, where the tonal contrast is well preserved in long as well as short words: Type A words consistently have a pitch fall, while Type B words consistently lack this phonetic feature. However, the lexical distinction is lost in some phonological contexts at the postlexical level. In interrogative sentences, neutralizations do occur, but only in monosyllabic words. In vocative sentences, on the other hand, they occur both in monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. These postlexical neutralizations can be attributed to the fact that question and vocative prosody invariably introduce a pitch fall in Type B words as well as Type A words. However, question and vocative prosody show tonal neutralizations to different degrees since they manifest the pitch fall in different ways.

主題