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Paper short abstract:

In this talk I clarify that the strength of positional restrictions on the non-nasal coda phoneme Q in Japanese is divided into four levels. This study intends to characterize Q both phonetically and phonologically and to describe how it is phonologically opposed to the nasal coda phoneme N.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk I clarify that the strength of positional restrictions on the non-nasal coda phoneme Q in Japanese is divided into four levels. This study intends to characterize Q both phonetically and phonologically and to describe how it is phonologically opposed to the nasal coda phoneme N, in an effort to reconstruct the phonemic system of Old Japanese. Japanese has coda phonemes, which can be classified into two types by nasality, from the late Heian period onward. One is the nasal coda phoneme N, traditionally called "hatsuon" in Japanese linguistics, and the other is the non-nasal Q, "sokuon." Some N are derived from the nasal phonemes m or n in coda slots of Sino-words. These m and n used to avoid directly preceding onsetless syllables by sandhi in which they copy themselves to the next empty onset slots (e.g. kwan-_ _om → kwan.n_om '觀音'; om-_jau → om.mjau '陰陽'; sam-_wi → sam.mwi '三位'). Nevertheless, N can come in most coda slots including those of the final syllables. On the other hand, Q appears only in coda slots followed by voiceless onsets. , however, appears also in coda slots not followed by the onsets, namely coda slots of the final syllables or those followed by voiced onsets, in some dialects of Modern Japanese. Interestingly, it can come in coda slots immediately before non-nasal obstruent onsets in all of the dialects but in the other coda slots only in few of the dialects. Considering this difference in the strength of positional restrictions on Q, we find out that this coda phoneme avoids immediately preceding the following syllable components in ascending order from the least restrictive ones to the most: (A) The voiced obstruent onsets b, d, z, and g, (B1) The nasal sonorant onsets m and n, (B2) The non-nasal sonorant onset r, (C1) The medials w and j, (C2) no components, and (D) nuclei.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to analyse the sociolinguistic variation of vowel devoicing using the CSJ. Age, gender and speech style variation has been analysed for different phonological environments. Particular attention will be given to atypical environments which showed a higher rate of variability.

Paper long abstract:

Maekawa and Kikuchi (2005) used the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (henceforth "CSJ") to analyse the frequency of vowel devoicing in different phonological environments. According to their analysis, the devoicing rate is highest when a fricative is followed by a stop and lowest when an affricate is followed by a fricative. Moreover, the results of their study suggest that devoicing also occurs in atypical environments, as in non-high vowels and in contexts where a vowel is followed by a voiced consonant. The use of a large corpus, which fully covers all the C1-C2 combinations, has permitted to produce one of the most reliable resource for the study of vowel devoicing. The frequency of devoicing is conditioned not only by phonological factors but, at a certain extent, also by extra-linguistic and sociological factors such as age, gender and speech style. Previous studies pointed out, for example, that devoicing is decreasing in young generation (Hirayama 1998), is more frequent for young males (Imai 2010) and is highly frequent in conversational speech as compared to controlled speech (Komatsu and Aoyagi 2005). However, this kind of researches makes use of experimental designed data which are not large enough for a complete analysis that covers all the phonological environments.

This paper aims to analyse the sociolinguistic variation of vowel devoicing in spontaneous Japanese using the CSJ-Core consisting of about 45 hours of speech, all of which have been (sub-)phonemically segmented. Age, gender and speech style variation has been analysed for different phonological environments and different C1-C2 combinations. Particular attention will be given to atypical environments which showed a higher rate of variability. A straightforward gender difference has been observed, for example, when devoicing occurs in contexts where the devoiced vowel is followed by a nasal consonant: the devoicing rate of /u/ in the /CVN/ environment is 20.84% for male and 12.31% for female. As for age graded-variation, devoicing of high vowels on accented moras is relatively more frequent for middle generation of speakers (45-54).

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Paper short abstract:

This is an empirical study on how Japanese categorize the Slovene mid-central unrounded vowel in their L1. Based on the reports that such mapping displays certain patterns, the paper discusses segmental and prosodic constraints of the target language that possibly contribute to such patterning.

Paper long abstract:

Based on the supposition that nowadays borrowings are mainly conducted on the auditory level, the present empirical study raises a question on how native Japanese listeners perceive and categorize the Slovene mid-central unrounded vowel sound /ǝ/, both in stressed and unstressed positions. Findings would help predict the katakana transcription for any new Slovene word but especially proper names that enter Japanese.

Previous studies have shown that in the borrowing process Slovene mid-central unrounded vowel sound /ǝ/ is an uncategorized vowel which assimilates into phonetically similar native Japanese phonemes (after PAM; Best 1995); it generally maps to the Japanese close back unrounded /u/ or to the open front unrounded /a/, however, mappings to the mid-close back rounded /o/ and mid-open front /e/ are also possible (Golob 2016). The fact that mappings follow certain patterns is intriguing, and the influence of the state of accentedness in the source language and the phonotactic restrictions of the target language have already been discussed (ibid. 2016). The present study, based on a perceptual experiment, offers a thorough insight into the conditions which Japanese language imposes on the foreign phonetic material, following the works of Dohlus 2010; Ito & Mester 1993, 1995, 1999; Kaneko 2007; Tsuchida 1995; etc. on lexical stratification and segmental formation of loanwords, and those of Kubozono 2001, 2002, 2006; Mutsukawa 2005; Sibata 1994; etc. on their prosodic (accentual) characteristics.

Perceptual experiment with the list of words was designed to solve the main research problem, namely why is the Slovene mid-central unrounded vowel sound /ǝ/ sometimes interpreted either as /e/ or /o/ though the two Japanese vowels are phonetically more distant than /u/ or /a/. This could be done systematically by answering the following questions: (1) which Japanese vowel engages when /u/ is ruled out due to Japanese allophonic restrictions; (2) how strong is the influence of the surrounding vowels onto the vowel selection; (3) how much do Japanese accentuation rules contribute to the choice of the vowel category.

(Literature list was withdrawn due to space limitation.)