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Paper short abstract

Regarding pronouns in the Hachijo dialect of Japanese, this paper adds new descriptions to previous research and argues that the Hachijo dialect has a contrast between regular plurals and approximate plurals that is not found in Japanese, and that these form a hierarchical structure.

Paper long abstract

The Hachijo dialect is spoken on Hachijo Island in Tokyo, just 55 minutes from Tokyo-Haneda Airport. It is a descendant of the ancient eastern dialect of Japanese, and retains some characteristics of Japanese from a time even older than the earliest written Japanese. It is also designated as an endangered language by UNESCO.

The demonstrative pronoun system of Hachijo has been described in previous studies by Hirayama Teruo (1965) and Kaneda Akihiro (2001), among others. However, issues such as the existence of first-person plural exclusion/inclusion, or whether plural forms can be used when there is essentially one person, have not been discussed. In this presentation, I refined the description of the Hachijo dialect's demonstrative pronoun system, providing a description and analysis that included the discovery of new phenomena.

Previous research has not mentioned the fact that there is no distinction between inclusive and exclusive in first-person plurals, but I will confirm this. I will also show that some usage of second-person pronouns is currently undergoing change (simplification).

Furthermore, we report on the plural suffix "-rara," which has not been mentioned in previous studies. By combining the newly discovered plural suffix "-rara" with the known plural suffix "-ra," we organize and systematize the two series and argue that the Hachijo dialect distinguishes between regular plurals and approximate plurals.

We will also show that there is a hierarchy in the addition of plural suffixes: -rara can be used with people, animals, and interrogative pronouns, but not with the personal names or inanimate objects; -ra was once used for inanimate objects but is no longer used.It also describes ongoing systemic changes in the category.

In this presentation, I clarified that approximative plurals exist in Hachijo dialect with a hierarchical structure through a more detailed description of the pronoun system. By investigating the dialect's language system in more detail and refining the description, I can show that dialect systems, which are thought to be similar to Japanese, have characteristics not found in Japanese. This research will contribute to the high-quality preservation of Hachijo, an endangered language, and to cross-linguistic analysis.