An acoustic-phonetic descriptive analysis of Kagoshima Japanese tonal phenomena

Abstract

This thesis presents a linguistic-phonetic description of the acoustic properties of the contrastive accentual patterns in Kagoshima Japanese. Kagoshima Japanese is one of the traditionally so-called two pattern varieties of Japanese. Different phonological analyses of the contrast are described in detail in order to situate the phonetic description. Data from four native speakers—two males and two females—are used, appropriately log z-score normalised to yield mean normalised FO curves necessary for linguistic-phonetic description. Normalisation procedures are discussed, justified and explained. The acoustic realisation of the Kagoshima Japanese contrast is specified on words from one to seven syllables in length, and a surface representation proposed within Autosegmental-Metrical theory. Some microprosodic aspects are also examined, especially in terms of the effect of the syllable-rhyme structure (i.e. vowel length, final nasal) on FO. In addition is examined what happens when accentual units are juxtaposed in three types of syntagms (noun phrase e.g. nagaka tamago; possessive phrase e.g. mago no kimono; simple sentence, e.g. sakana ga nigeru). Where appropriate, comparisons are drawn with Standard Japanese to highlight similarities and differences in tonality. It is shown that, like Standard Japanese, the Kagoshima Japanese accentual contrast is realised as ± falling pitch/FO, and also like SJ, the contrast is manifested globally, throughout the word. Microprosodically, it is shown that syllable-final nasals are associated with higher FO, not necessarily on the nasal itself, and that heavy syllables also evince a higher FO. Finally, two extrinsic allotones—level and falling—are demonstrated for one of the accentual types, depending on its rhyme constituents. As far as the juxtaposed data are concerned, it is shown that, unlike Standard Japanese, no deaccentuation is involved. Moreover, a differential effect is demonstrated, in terms of FO downstep, with respect to syntactic type: noun phrases behave differently from possessive phrases and simple sentences in showing no downstep. It is suggested that the magnitude of downstep in Kagoshima Japanese may be smaller than in Standard Japanese. It is proposed that the linguistic-phonetic representations derived in this thesis can be used not only to investigate within-language linguistic features (e.g. the Kagoshima Japanese accentual contrast), but also to compare Kagoshima with the corresponding linguistic-phonetic representations of other Japanese varieties.