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Using Tonal Data to Recover Japanese Language History
e-Book – Open Access 
ISBN 9789027246776
This book challenges several assumptions commonly encountered in Japanese dialectology: that the pitch-accent analysis of modern Tōkyō Japanese is an appropriate basis for describing the suprasegmental phonology of other dialects and earlier stages of Japanese; that the Kyōto-type dialects have been more conservative than dialects to their east and west; that the first split in proto-Japanese was the separation of proto-Ryūkyūan; and so on. De Boer brings together evidence from recent fieldwork, premodern texts, and other sources to establish a theory of dialect divergence that avoids the problems these assumptions entail. Building on De Boer 2010, this book brings the author’s theory up to date with research published in the interim, explains why Japanese is best understood as a restricted tone language, and why mergers in the large tone classes of nouns and verbs are especially reliable markers of dialect divergence.
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 365] 2024. viii, 130 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 19 July 2024
Published online on 19 July 2024
© John Benjamins
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Table of Contents
- Editor’s preface | pp. vii–viii
- Introduction | pp. 1–3
- Chapter 1. A brief history of Japanese dialect research and dialect classification | pp. 4–12
- Chapter 2. Tone or pitch-accent? Analysis and use of terminology | pp. 13–17
- Chapter 3. The tone systems of the modern dialects | pp. 18–26
- Chapter 4. On the interpretation of Middle Japanese tone notations | pp. 27–31
- Chapter 5. Tracing the tone class divisions | pp. 32–38
- Chapter 6. Outline of tonal developments in the history of Japanese | pp. 39–49
- Chapter 7. The importance of compounds in pJ reconstruction | pp. 50–53
- Chapter 8. The tone rules for compound nouns in Middle Japanese | pp. 54–65
- Chapter 9. The tones of compounds with long codas in the modern dialects | pp. 66–85
- Chapter 10. The tones of compounds with short codas in the modern dialects | pp. 86–103
- Chapter 11. The genealogy of the dialects on the Sea of Japan coast and Kyūshū | pp. 104–116
- Editor’s afterword | pp. 117–119
- References | pp. 120–125
- Appendix. Japanese tone database | pp. 126–127
- Index | pp. 129–130
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