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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines syllable weakening in Kagoshima Japanese. Final high vowel loss and lenition gives rise to final consonants, e.g. Tokyo [kaki], Kagoshima [kaʔ] 'persimmon'. I discuss generational shift where this pattern is partially lost or lost entirely as well as reasons for such a shift.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines syllable weakening, or nisshôka/入声化 in Kagoshima Japanese (KJ), where high vowel apocope feeds lenition, leading to correspondences such as Tokyo Japanese (TJ) [kaki] 'persimmon' and Kagoshima [kaʔ] (Haraguchi 1984, Kibe 1997, Kaneko & Kawahara 2002).The traditional pattern noted in the literature is quite clear. Apocope elides stem-final u or I. The preceding onset is lenited in one of four ways: I) stops and affricates are debuccalised (/kaki/ > [kaʔ] 'persimmon'), II) fricatives undergo voicing neutralisation (TJ [kazu] > KJ [kas] 'number'), III) nasals undergo place loss (e.g. TJ [kami] > KJ [kaN] 'paper'), and finally IV) rhotics undergo gliding (e.g. TJ [maru] > [maj] 'round'). The two research questions for my fieldwork were Q1: whether weakening is maintained and Q2: whether lenition shows any generational change.

Results

Q1: The above pattern is undergoing shift (field notes, April 2019); older consultants weaken words containing stops as in (1a) and nasals as in (1c), but they do not exhibit syllable weakening for fricatives (1b) or rhotics (1d). Concretely, older speakers no longer exhibit sibilant-final words like [kwaʃ] 'fire' but rather produce Tokyo [kadʑi], but final glottal stops and nasal consonants are found in in words like [kaN] for 'paper', c.f. Tokyo [kami] and [kaʔ] 'persimmon', Tokyo [kaki]. Younger people do not produce syllable weakening and use the Standard pronunciation universally.

Q2: For nouns, it is likely that weakening is diachronic as the final consonant does not alternate (field notes), but in verbs it is active. Consonant-final verb stems in the non-past such as /kak/ 'write' are realised with a lenited stem-final consonant, giving [kaʔ] 'write-NP'. Addition of the Negative suffix /-aN/ allows the underlying stem-final consonant to surface, giving [kakaN] 'write-NEG'. This also occurs with m-final stems, as in /tanom/ 'ask, request', [tanoN] 'ask-NP', /tanom-aN/ [tanomaN] 'ask-NEG'.

The full paper discusses the patterns in further detail and considers phonological and non-phonological factors affecting the change in weakening.