Prosodic Unit, Recursive Structure, and Nature of Accent in Miyako Ryukyuan

要旨

Abstract Focusing on the three-pattern accentual systems in Uechi, a dialect of the Miyako archipelago, this paper argues that the prosodic category PWd plays a pivotal role, in addition to the mora, as basic prosodic unit required to calculate accent placement. The paper also shows that prosodic conditions that bring about neutralizations of tonal patterns in Uechi can be fully accounted for by making use of PWd, in addition to postulating that the PWds consist of recursive structures. It then reports, focusing on the dialect of Tarama island in the same Miyako archipelago, a representative case of tonal alternations occurring at the sentence level, in which the odd numbered (1st, 3rd, etc.) accents in a sentence change High tone to Low tone, while the even numbered (2nd, 4th, etc.) change Low tone to High tone. The discovery of such unique types of pitch realization in the prosodic systems in this area should make an important contribution to typological studies of prosodic systems of Japanese, as well as of other languages.

主題