Neutralizations in vowel length and word accent in Japanese

要旨

Tokyo Japanese (henceforth, 'Japanese' for short) has a contrast both in vowel length and word accent.While both types of phonological contrasts are preserved quite well at the lexical level, their behavior at the postlexical level remains largely understudied.With that background, this paper aims to clarify where and how the two types of contrasts are preserved or lost in a vocative chant of Japanese baseball.This paper is organized as follows.Before we go into the main discussion, we describe in the rest of this introductory chapter the two types of lexical contrasts in Japanese.Section 2 sketches the basic phonological structures and principles underlying the baseball chant.This will be followed by an analysis of vowel length contrast in the chant (section 3) and that of word accent contrast (section 4).Section 5 gives a summary.It is well known that short and long vowels contrast both in word-final and non-final positions in Japanese, as exemplified in (1).It is also known that some words tend to undergo word-final vowel shortening, as exemplified in (2), which may eventually lead to the loss of vowel length contrast in this position (Kubozono 2002(Kubozono , 2004)).In (1) and (2) as well as in the rest of this paper, dots and hyphens indicate syllable and (major) morpheme boundaries, respectively, whereas apostrophes denote word accent, or the position where an abrupt pitch fall occurs.Words marked with superscript 0 are 'unaccented' words, or words that do not exhibit a pitch fall even if followed by grammatical particles like the nominative particle ga.(1) a. bi '.ru 'building' vs. bi'i.ru'beer' b. ka.ra-bo'k.ku.su 'empty box' vs. ka.raa-bo'k.ku.su 'color box' c. kan.ko'o-hi 'publication cost' vs. kan-ko'o.hii'canned coffee' d. pa'a.ma'permanent wave' vs. pa'a.maa'Palmer (personal name)' e. syo'o.ta'Shota (personal name) vs. syo'o.taa'Shorter (personal name)' (2) a. a.ri'.ga.too ~ a.ri'.ga.to 'thank you' b. nyo'o.boo~ nyo'o.bo'(my) wife' c. kak.koo 0 ~ kak.ko 0 'appearance, clothes' d. tyo'o.tyoo~ tyo'o.tyo'butterfly'Similarly, lexical pitch accent is also distinctive in the language and serves to distinguish many pairs of words that would otherwise become entirely homophonous.

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