Ōgami: Éléments de description d'un parler du Sud des Ryūkyū

要旨

This dissertation is a linguistic description of the Ōgami dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan, an endangered Japonic language of the Southern Ryukyus. The data have been collected by the author during fieldwork. After having described the linguistic, geographic and historical background of the Ōgami dialect, a synchronic description of the language is given. Ōgami has a relatively small-sized phoneme inventory. It has the very rare characteristic of allowing syllables and words without vowels nor any other voiced sound. Previous analyses positing devoiced vowels in the nucleus of such syllables are refuted on the basis of acoustic and morphophonological evidence. The different word classes, case markers and pragmatic role markers, as well as their morphology, are described in several chapters. An overview of the syntax of the noun phrase and the sentence is given. Special attention is paid to the clause chaining system and desubordination of converbs: some converbs have acquired the ability to head independent sentences, with, for example, a past tense value. This is followed by several chapters on diachronic issues. First, a phylogenetic classification of the Ryukyuan languages and then of the Miyako dialects is proposed. The phonology, noun morphology and verbal system of proto-Miyako are then reconstructed on the basis of data from five dialects. Proto-Miyako is compared to Japanese and several contributions to the reconstruction of proto-Japonic are proposed.

主題