Séminaire de Mme Akiko Takemura, prof de National Institutes for the Humanities of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics - Date : jeudi 14 mars 2013, 14h00 - Lieu : salle "seminar", 9ème étage, Institut MICA, Hanoi University of Science and Technology

Intervenant :
Mme TAKEMURA Akiko, National Institutes for the Humanities of the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics

Date : jeudi 14 mars 2013, 14h00
Lieu : salle "seminar room", 9ème étage, Institut MICA, bâtiment B1, Hanoi University of Science and Techology
Interprète traducteur : le séminaire sera présenté en anglais

Résumé/abstract:
This research presents an ongoing tonal change in the Kagoshima dialect of Japanese (KJ). KJ has a prosodic system that is quite different from that of Tokyo Japanese (TJ), the standard dialect. KJ has four characteristics: (i) a syllable-based prosody, (ii) a two-pattern lexical tone system, (iii) the phonological word as the tone domain, and (iv) a tone preservation rule in compound words.
While TJ has a free-location pitch accent system, KJ has a two-pattern tone system: each lexical word, irrespective of its length or lexical category, belongs to one of the two categories A or B. Tone A words have a High tone on their penultimate syllable, while Tone B words have a High tone on their final syllable. Contrary to TJ, where the accent (=High tone) location is fixed, the location of the High tone in KJ can shift to the right as clitics are attached, since the tonal domain is the prosodic word and not the lexical word.

(1) Traditional Kagoshima (Tokyo)
Tone A: Isolation ta.be.mó.no (ta.bé.mo.no) ‘food’
With clitics ta.be.mo.nó-ga (ta.bé.mo.no-ga) ‘food-NOM’
Tone B: Isolation no.mi.mo.nó (no.mí.mo.no) ‘beverage’
With clitics no.mi.mo.no-gá (no.mí.mo.no-ga) ‘beverage-NOM’

It has been reported that there is an ongoing tonal change in words in isolation and in compounds, but NOT when clitics attach (Kubozono 2006, 2007). Our data shows, however, that this change is also taking place in words followed by clitics in the case of younger KJ speakers. Thus, while the High tone traditionally shifts to the right when clitics attach (1), we found that the High tone now tends to remain on the same syllable of the lexical word (2).

Innovative Kagoshima (Tokyo)
(2) a. Tone A: ta.be.mó.no →ta.be.mó.no-ga (ta.bé.mo.no →ta.bé.mo.no-ga)
b. Tone B: no.mi.mo.nó →no.mi.mo.nó-ga (no.mí.mo.no →no.mí.mo.no-ga)

We suggest that this tonal change is the result of the influence of TJ, where the position of the accent (=High tone) is fixed. The resulting patterns fall outside the limits imposed by the traditional two-pattern tone system of KJ, where the location of the High tone is prohibited in positions other than ultimate or penultimate. This tonal change in progress observed in KJ significantly departs from the traditional system and indicates the existence of an ongoing strong influence of TJ.

Bibliography
Kubozono, Haruo. 2006. Akusento no hōsoku [Rules of Accent]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten.
---------------------- 2007. Kagoshima no akusento henka: Fukugō hōsoku no hōkai [Tonal change in Kagoshima dialect: Destruction of compound rule]. Kobe Papers in Linguistics 5: 111-123.