Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody
in Koshikijima Japanese*

KUBOZONO, Haruo

Abstract
This paper discusses the phonology of tone in Koshikijima Japanese, ane­ndangered dialect spoken on the Koshikijima Islands in the south of Japan.
Particularly interesting is the relationship between word-level and sentencelevel phonology, as well as the interaction between the mora and the syllable.
Separated by the sea from its neighboring dialects, Koshikijima Japanese
has developed a unique prosodic system. Like its neighbors, it has a two-­pattern system, where every word takes either of two tonal patterns, Type A andType B. Unlike its neighbors, however, both tonal types can have two pitch
peaks, or two high tones (Hs): Type A has a H1L1H2L2 pattern, whereas Type B
has a H1L1H2 pattern. Interestingly, the first two tones of each pattern (H1L1 )are associated with words on the basis of the syllable, while the remaining
tones (H2L2 or H2 ) are linked with particular moras. At the word level, thedomain of the first high tone (H1 ) can be computed only after the position of thesecond high tone (H2 ) is determined, indicating that H2 phonologically dominates H1. However, this dominance relationship is reversed at the sentencelevel, where H2 undergoes deletion everywhere except in the sentence-final
position. This paper discusses this paradoxical relationship between wordlevel and sentence-level tonal patterns and other related issues.

* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Atami Phonology Festa in Japan (February
5, 2007) and the International Phonetics-Phonology Conference in Shanghai (May, 2010). I
would like to thank the audiences of these conferences for various insightful comments. The
work reported in this paper was supported by the NINJAL collaborative research project‘P­honological characteristics of the Japanese lexicon’ and the JSPS grant-in-Aid for Scientific
Research (A) (Grant no. 22242011).
The Linguistic Review 29 (2012), 109 – 130
DOI 10.1515/tlr-2012-0005

0167– 6318/12/029-0109© Walter de Gruyter

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1.

Kubozono, Haruo
Introduction

This paper discusses the phonology of tone in Koshikijima Japanese, an endangered dialect spoken in the south of Japan, on the Koshikijima Islands off thecoast of Kagoshima. This dialect is of linguistic importance not only because
it is an endangered dialect with estimated 3,000 native speakers, but alsob­ecause its prosodic system remains largely undocumented and unstudied. In
fact, the only substantial work on this topic is the two short papers by Takaji
Kamimura (Kamimura 1937, 1941), which we will review and compare with
our data in section 4.4. This paper reports on the results of some recent fieldwork on this endangered dialect of Japanese. We focus on the following questions: (i) how and how much two sister dialects – Kagoshima and Koshikijima
Japanese – can differ prosodically if they are separated by the sea, (ii) how
intricately the two prosodic units – the mora and the syllable – can be relatedwith each other in the same prosodic system, (iii) why certain prosodic asymmetries occur in K­oshikijima Japanese, and (iv) how word-level prosody isdifferent from sentence-level prosody in the same prosodic system.
The Koshikijima Islands, consisting of three small islands, are located about
40 km off the mainland of Kagoshima. They consist of over ten villages eachof which has twenty to one thousand inhabitants. This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Teuchi in 2005–2008. Teuchi is the second biggest village,
located at the southern edge of the southernmost island, with about 900 inhabitants. The main data were obtained from middle-aged speakers (about fifty
years old) in the village.
This paper consists of four sections. In the second section (Section 2), we
will demonstrate the crucial similarities and differences observed between
K­oshikijima Japanese and its neighboring dialect, Kagoshima Japanese. Section 3 describes the peculiar behavior that the endangered dialect exhibits withrespect to the mora and the syllable, both of which are indispensable for thedescription of its prosodic system. Section 4 expands the scope to sentencelevel prosody, where words and phrases exhibit different prosodic patternsb­etween sentence-medial and sentence-final positions: they display two Hightones – H1 and H2 – in sentence-final position, whereas they undergo H2 deletion in non-final position. This gives rise to an interesting case, where H2 dominates H1 in word-level phonology but undergoes deletion in sentence-level
phonology. The final section (Section 5) summarizes the main points and identifies some major issues that remain for future work.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 1112.
2.1.

Basic prosodic structures
Two-pattern system

The most basic prosodic feature that characterizes Koshikijima Japanese is thatit has a two-pattern system, a prosodic system that has only two tonal patterns
regardless of the length of the word or its syntactic category (e.g. nouns, verbs).
This feature is shared by its neighboring dialects, Kagoshima Japanese andNagasaki Japanese, which are assumed to be its sister dialects (Hirayama 1951;
Shibatani 1990; Kibe 2000; Kubozono 2004, 2007, 2010, 2011; Sakaguchi2001). Koshikijima Japanese is particularly similar to Kagoshima Japanese as
regards the phonological shape of the two tonal patterns: Type A and Type B.1
Type A exhibits a High-Low (HL) tone sequence in word/morpheme-final­position, whereas Type B involves only a H tone in the final position. Moreover, these two prosodic patterns are largely lexical in both dialects, that is, itis basically impossible to predict which morpheme exhibits which prosodic
pattern.2 It is impossible to explain, for example, why /natu/ ‘summer’ and/ huyu/ ‘winter’ / haru/ belong to Type A, whereas / haru/ ‘spring’ and /aki/‘a­utumn’ belong to Type B.3 Furthermore, there is a high degree of agreement
between the two dialects as to the lexical association of morphemes with tonal
patterns, so that most Type A morphemes in Koshikijima belong to Type A in
Kagoshima, whereas most Type B morphemes in Koshikijima belong to TypeB in Kagoshima. These basic facts indicate that the two dialects are historicallyclosely related with each other.
Yet, the two-pattern system of Koshikijima Japanese is different from that ofKagoshima Japanese in that it has two high tones in both of the two tonal patterns (Type A and Type B). In the framework of autosegmental phonology(Goldsmith 1976; Haraguchi 1977), Koshikijima Japanese has a HLHL ‘melody’ or pattern for Type A and a HLH pattern for Type B, whereas Kagoshima

1. Koshikijima Japanese is much closer to Kagoshima than to Nagasaki not only geographically,
but also in terms of the basic tonal shapes of words and phrases. In Nagasaki, the initial two
moras are high toned in Type A, whereas the final mora is high toned in Type B (Sakaguchi2001). In Koshikijima and Kagoshima, on the other hand, a high tone appears in the penultimate position in Type A and in the final position in Type B.
2. There are quite a few minimal pairs of words that are distinguished tonally, e.g. /ame/ ‘candy’,/too/ ‘ten’, / hana/ ‘nose’, / kanzyoo/ ‘emotion’ (Type A) vs. /ame/ ‘rain’, /too/ ‘tower’, / hana/‘flower’, / kanzyoo/ ‘calculation, counting’ (Type B), to mention just a few.
3. This said, it must be added that loanwords, particularly those borrowed recently, show a strong
bias towards Type A in both Kagoshima and Koshikijima Japanese. This is compatible withthe fact that loanwords tend to take a falling pitch pattern across Japanese dialects (Kubozono
2006, 2008).

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Kubozono, Haruo

Japanese has LHL and LH patterns.4 In phonetic terms, Koshikijima Japanese
can exhibit two pitch peaks within a word. This is exemplified in (1). In (1) andthe rest of this paper, high-toned syllables/moras5 are denoted by capital l­etters,
while syllable boundaries are indicated by dots. Disyllabic or shorter words
exhibit only one pitch peak, as will be discussed shortly below.
(1)

Kagoshima

Koshikijima

Gloss

LHL#

HLHL#

a.ma.ZA.ke

A.ma.ZA.ke

sweet sake

Type A na.tu.ya.SU.mi

NA.TU.ya.SU.misummer holiday

a.me.ma.TU.ri

A.ME.ma.TU.ri

candy festival

ma.ku.do.na.RU.do MA.KU.DO.na.RU.do McDonald’s
LH#

HLH#

o.to.KO

O.to.KOman

A.SA.ga.O

morning glory

ha.ru.ya.su.MI

HA.RU.YA.su.MI

spring holiday

a.me.ma.tu.RI

A.ME.MA.tu.RI

rain festival

Type B a.sa.ga.O

The tonal shapes of words in (1) can be accounted for by the tonal associations illustrated in (2), where the relevant pattern is assigned from right to leftin both Type A and Type B words. In Type A in Kagoshima, for example, L2 of
the L1H1L2 pattern is associated with the word-final syllable, H1 is linked withthe penultimate syllable, and L1 is associated with the remaining syllables atthe beginning of the word. Koshikijima Japanese is different from Kagoshima
only in involving an extra H tone (H1) before L1, which spreads over several

4. This analysis does not mean that H and L tones should be treated in the same way. As will bemade clear in the course of discussion, the position of H tones is directly relevant for determining the overall prosodic structure in both systems (cf. Yoshida 1999).
5. In Japanese, moras can be divided into two groups, those that can constitute a syllable on theirown and those that cannot. The latter group, which we call ‘non-syllabic moras’ in this paper(Kubozono 1989), includes the moraic nasal, the moraic obstruent (or the second half of ageminate consonant), the second half of a long vowel and the second half of a diphthong ([ai],[oi] or [ui]). Thus, /too.kyoo/ ‘Tokyo’, /ron.don/ ‘London’ and /nis.san/ ‘Nissan’ are all disyllabic words consisting of four moras. See Kubozono (1999, 2004) for more details about thephonological behavior and status of the syllable and the mora in Japanese.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 113
syllables at the beginning of the word.6 The two dialects show essentially thesame difference in Type B words, too, as shown in (2b).
(2) a. Type A Kagoshima			x...x x x
| | |
			
			
L1H1L 2b. Type B			x...x x
| |
			
			
L1H1

Koshikijima
x...x x x x| | | |
H1L1H2L 2
x...x x x
| | |H1L1H2

A comparison between (2a) and (2b) shows that Type A and Type B differ onlyin the presence or absence of the final L tone (L 2) in both dialects. What thismeans is that the position of the H tone before this final L is distinctive in both
Kagoshima and Koshikijima.7
The tonal assignment looks a little more complex in shorter words. Disyllabic words, for example, are apparently not long enough to implement theL1H1L 2 pattern in Kagoshima or the H1L1H2L 2 pattern in Koshikijima. The
essential rule in such cases is that tones are linked from right to left in the same
way as in longer words, but any remaining tones remain unlinked with thephonological material.8 This is illustrated in (3). To take the A-type morpheme/na.tu/ ‘summer’, for example, both dialects assign HL to this word, with theinitial L (Kagoshima) or HL (Koshikijima) in the basic pattern left unlinked
with any phonological material in the word.
(3)

Type A

Kagoshima

Koshikijima

Gloss(L1)H1L 2#(H1L1)H2L 2#

TOo

TOo

ten

A.me

A.me

candy

NA.tu

NA.tu

summer

6. Kamimura (1937, 1941) reports a different pattern for the domain of this first H tone. This will
be discussed in section 4.4.
7. A reviewer suggests that LH and HLH are the only permitted basic tonal patterns in the two
dialects, respectively, i.e., that the difference between Type A and Type B can be attributed to
the landing site of the basic (H)LH patterns.
8. See Goldsmith’s (1976) and Haraguchi’s (1977) association conventions, which allow for thispossibility.

114

Kubozono, Haruo

Type B(L1)H1#(H1)L1H2#

TOO

toO

tower

IN

iN

dog

a.ME

a.ME

rain

ha.RU

ha.RU

springMonosyllabic words exhibit some interesting patterns in both dialects. In
Kagoshima, bimoraic monosyllables are realized with a falling pitch (HL) in
Type A, and with a flat pitch (H) in Type B: e.g. /TOo/9 ‘ten’ vs. /TOO/ ‘tower’.
This contrast is maintained in monomoraic words, too, where Type A and TypeB take a falling and flat pattern, respectively: / hì/ ‘sunlight’ vs. / hī/ ‘fire’. In
terms of tonal assignment, this means that the initial L tones of the basic patterns (L1H1L 2 and L1H1) remain unlinked and consequently unrealized in both
tonal types. These facts indicate that the distinctive features of the two tonal
patterns are HL (Type A) and H (Type B), while the initial L tones in both tonal
types are quite redundant in the system. In phonetic terms, this means that thetwo tonal types differ solely in the presence or absence of a pitch fall.
Koshikijima Japanese exhibits somewhat different patterns from Kagoshima
in monosyllabic words. In this system, bimoraic monosyllables show a c­ontrast
between falling (HL) and rising (LH) patterns: /TOo/ ‘ten’ vs. /toO/ ‘tower’.
The rising pattern for Type B is different from the flat pattern (H) for the same
tonal type in Kagoshima, which can be attributed to the fact we will see in section 2.3 below; that is, unlike Kagoshima Japanese, Koshikijima Japanese has
a mora-based system, where H2 and L 2 are generally realized mora by morarather than syllable by syllable. Furthermore, Koshikijima is different from
Kagoshima in that the tonal contrast is not preserved in monomoraic words.
This endangered dialect somehow neutralizes the two tonal patterns c­ompletely
in monomoraic words like / hi/ ‘sunlight’ and / hi/ ‘fire’.

2.2. Compound accent rule
It was pointed out in the preceding section that the choice of Type A or Type B
for every morpheme is basically arbitrary. However, this does not apply tocompound expressions. On the contrary, the prosody of compound words and9. In this type of word, tones are apparently assigned on a moraic rather than syllabic basis, but thisis due to the lack of sufficient phonological material in the word to which tones are associated.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 115
phrases is governed by so-called Hirayama’s Law in (4), which is widelyo­bserved in the two-pattern systems in the south of Japan (Hirayama 1951).
(4) Compound words/phrases inherit the tonal pattern of their initialm­orpheme10
According to this law, the basic tonal pattern of the compound-initial morpheme is associated with the whole compound from right to left in the fashion
described above. For example, every compound expression beginning with
the Type A morpheme /na.tu/ ‘summer’ takes Type A, with the L1H1L 2 andH1L1H2L 2 patterns assigned to the compound expression in Kagoshima andKoshikijima, respectively. Similarly, every compound expression beginningwith the Type B morpheme / ha.ru/ ‘spring’ takes a L1H1 pattern in Kagoshima
and a H1L1H2 pattern in Koshikijima. This is illustrated and exemplified in (5)and (6) for Kagoshima and in (7) and (8) for Koshikijima. Hyphens indicate
morpheme boundaries.
(5) Kagoshima
Type A		natu
na.tu-ya.su.mi| | |		 | |
L1H1L2
L1H1 L2(6) a.
		
		
		
		
b.
		
		
		
		

Type Bha.ru haru-yasu.mi
| |
| |
L1H1
L 1 H1

NA.tu ‘summer’na.TU-ga ‘summer-NOM’
na.tu-FU.ku ‘summer clothes’
na.tu-ya.SU.mi ‘summer holiday’
na.tu-ya.su.mi-KA.ra ‘from the summer holiday’
ha.RU ‘spring’ha.ru-GA ‘spring-NOM’
ha.ru-fu.KU ‘spring clothes’
ha.ru-ya.su.MI ‘spring holiday’
ha.ru-ya.su.mi-ka.RA ‘from the spring holiday’(7) Koshikijima
Type A		
na.tu na.tu-ya.su.mi| || | | |
		
H1L1H2L2
H1L1 H2 L2(8) a.
		Type Bha.ru| |H1 L1H2

ha.ru-ya.su.mi| | |H1 L1 H2

NA.tu ‘summer’na.TU-ga ‘summer-NOM’

10. A similar compound tone rule is reported for Shanghai Chinese (Hung 1989).

116

Kubozono, Haruo

		
		
		
b.
		
		
		
		

NA.tu-FU.ku ‘summer clothes’
NA.TU-ya.SU.mi ‘summer holiday’
NA.TU-YA.SU.mi-KA.ra ‘from the summer holiday’
ha.RU ‘spring’
HA.ru-GA ‘spring-NOM’
HA.RU-fu.KU ‘spring clothes’
HA.RU-YA.su.MI ‘spring holiday’
HA.RU-YA.SU.MI-ka.RA ‘from the spring holiday’

Compound phrases exemplified in (6) and (8) correspond to so-called ‘bunsetsu’, or sequences consisting of a content word and one or more particles.
Since this syntactic unit represents the maximal size of prosodic words fortonal assignment sketched in (2) above, we will use the term ‘lexical’, ‘wordlevel’ or ‘word domain’ (as opposed to sentence level/domain) in the rest of
this paper to refer to the level/domain where the prosodic word is defined.
It may be worth adding here that the tonal associations are independent of(a) word types – native Japanese, Sino-Japanese and foreign – and ( b) word/phrase-internal compositions as well as (c) the syntactic category of the word.
(9) and (10) show A-type and B-type words, respectively, all consisting offour monomoraic syllables. Words in (9) take a H1L1H2L 2 pattern, whereas
those in (10) take a H1L1H2 pattern ( /-/ in (9b) and (10b) denotes a morphemeb­oundary).
(9) a.
		
		
b.
		
		
c.
		
		

KE.da.MO.no ‘wild animal’ (native)
TO.ku.BE.tu ‘special (status)’ (Sino-Japanese)
BU.ra.ZI.ru ‘Brazil’ (foreign)
A.ma-ZA.ke ‘sweet sake’
KO-ga.TA.na ‘penknife’
KI.mi.GA-yo ‘Kimigayo, the Japanese national anthem’KE.da.MO.no ‘wild animal’ (noun)
HA.ta.RA.ku ‘to work’ (verb)
U.ru.SA.ka ‘noisy’ (adjective)(10) a.
		
		
b.
		
		
c.
		
		

A.SA.ga.O ‘morning glory (flower)’ (native)
GA.KU.se.TU ‘theory’ (Sino-Japanese)
A.ME.ri.KA ‘America’ (foreign)
YA.MA-ne.KO ‘wildcat’
O-NI.gi.RI ‘rice ball’
KA.SE.gi-TE ‘bread winner’
A.SA.ga.O ‘morning glory’ (noun)
SI.RA.be.RU ‘to examine’ (verb)
SA.BI.si.KA ‘lonely’ (adjective)

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 117
3.

Mora vs. syllable

So far, Koshikijima Japanese is different from its sister dialect of Kagoshima
only in the basic tonal patterns: it additionally involves an initial H tone in bothType A and Type B. However, the two dialects exhibit a crucial difference withrespect to the prosodic units they employ. The prosodic system of Kagoshima
Japanese is quite simple in this respect as it consistently uses the syllable fortonal assignment. This is shown in (11), where H and L tones are assigned syllable by syllable.
(11) Kagoshima
a. Type A (L1H1L 2)
		 ke.da.MO.no ‘wild animal’		 ke.DA.mon ‘wild animal (colloquial)’
		 e.fu.BII.ai ‘FBI’		 ke.da.MON-ga ‘wild animal-NOM’
		 BA.ree ‘volleyball’b. Type B (L1H1)
		 mi.KAN ‘orange’		 ni.wa.to.RI ‘chicken’		 ni.wa.TOI ‘chicken (colloquial)’
		 ni.wa.toi-GA ‘chicken-NOM’
		 sen.SEI ‘teacher’Koshikijima Japanese is more complex since it relies on the mora as well as
the syllable. Recall that this dialect has the tonal patterns H1L1H2L 2 (Type A)
and H1L1H2 (Type B). Specifically, it assigns the initial HL tones (H1L1) inboth Type A and Type B on the basis of the syllable, but the remaining tones– H2L 2 (Type A) and H2 (Type B) – are assigned on the basis of the mora. Thisis illustrated in (12), which should be compared with the data of Kagoshima
given in (11). Typical F0 contours of / NI.WA.toI/ and / NI.WA.toi-GA/ in (12b)pronounced in isolation are shown in Figure 1.
(12) a.
		
		
		
		
		
		
b.
		
		

Type A (H1L1H2L2)
KE.da.MO.no ‘wild animal’
KE.da.MOn ‘wild animal (colloquial)’
E.FU.bii.Ai ‘FBI’
PII.tii.Ee ‘PTA’
ba.REe ‘volleyball’A.KA.sin.GOo ‘red signal’Type B (H1L1H2)
MI.kaN ‘orange’
NI.WA.to.RI ‘chicken’118

Kubozono, Haruo

		
		
		
		
		

NI.WA.toI ‘chicken (colloquial)’
NI.WA.toi-GA ‘chicken-NOM’
SEN.seI ‘teacher’SEN.sei-GA ‘teacher-NOM’
A.O.SIN.goO ‘green signal’Figure 1. Typical F0 contours of / NI.WA.toI/ ‘chicken’ and / NI.WA.toi-GA/ ‘chicken-NOM’(Type B).

In /E.FU.bii.Ai / in (12a), for example, the final L tone of the basic pattern, i.e.
L 2 in H1L1H2L 2, is realized on the second mora of the final heavy syllable, andits preceding H tone (H2) on the first mora of the same syllable. In contrast, L1
is associated with the syllable immediately preceding it, with the initial H tone
(H1) subsequently linked with all other syllables at the beginning of the word.
Type B words undergo essentially the same tonal assignment, as illustrated in(12b), whereby the final H tone (H2) is associated with the final mora of theword, whether or not it constitutes a syllable on its own, L1 is linked with asyllable or syllable-sized unit immediately preceding it, and H1 with ther­emaining syllables at the beginning of the word. This process of tonal assignment is shown in (13a–b) for Type A and Type B, respectively.
(13) a.
				

e.fu.bii.a i| | | |
H1L1H2L2b.

ni.wa.toi-ga| | |H1 L1 H2

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 119
Note that L1 is associated with one and only one syllable in both tonal types.11
Using both the mora and the syllable in this way, the tonal assignment in Koshikijima seems sufficiently complicated. However, it becomes more complicated if
one considers a H tone shift that occurs in Type A words. If Type A words end ina sequence of a heavy syllable followed by a light syllable, then the second H tone
(H2) in the H1L1H2L 2 pattern is not associated with the penultimate mora, butrather, it is linked with one mora to the left.12 In other words, the H tone in question cannot be linked with any ‘non-syllabic mora’ (Kubozono 1989), or the­second mora of a heavy syllable, due probably to a constraint prohibiting any
segments other than a syllable nucleus from becoming the peak of the word.
This is exemplified in (14) and schematically shown in (15).
(14)

PUu.ru, *pu.U.ru ‘pool’
PAn.tu, *pa.N.tu ‘pants’
RAi.to, *raI.to ‘right, light’
KE.da.MOn-ga, *KEDA.moN-ga ‘wild animal-NOM’
ba.REe-ga, *BA.reE-ga ‘volleyball-NOM’(15) a. * σ σ
b.		
σ σ
|
|
		
		
μ μμ
μ μμ
|
|
			 | | |		 H1L1H2L2		 H1L1H2 L2
It must be noted here that unlike Type A words, Type B words freely allow
their second H tone to be linked with the second mora of a heavy syllable, e.g.
MI.kaN ‘orange’, NI.WA.toI ‘chicken’ in (12b), apparently violating the constraint mentioned above. This yields an asymmetry between the two tonal
types with respect to the capability of non-syllabic moras to bear the second H
tone in the basic patterns: non-syllabic moras can be linked with the second
H tone in Type B, but not in Type A. This interesting asymmetry may bea­ccounted for if one considers the possibility of merger, i.e. neutralization of
the two tonal types in the system. If the H tone shift should occur in Type B
11. An exceptional pattern is observed in four-mora or five-mora Type A words that begin with aheavy syllable. These words exceptionally allow the two H tones to be adjacent to each other:e.g. / RON.DOn/ ‘London’, / PII.KEi/ ‘PK, penalty kick’, /TON.NE.ru/ ‘tunnel’, /SAI.BOo.gu/‘cyborg’, /KAN.ZYOo/ ‘emotion’, / NII.SAn/ ‘elder brother’ (vs. / ba.REe/ ‘volleyball’,/zi.KAn/ ‘time’).
12. Essentially the same type of H tone shift occurs in Tokyo Japanese. In this dialect, non-­syllabic
moras cannot bear a lexical pitch accent, or the H tone immediately before a L tone. If thelexical accent is assigned to a non-syllabic mora by rule, it invariably shifts one mora to theleft, i.e. to the syllabic mora of the relevant syllable: e.g. */roN.don/ → / ROn.don/ ‘London’;*/saI.daa/ → /SAi.daa/ ‘lemonade’, */saK.ku.su/ → /SAk.ku.su/ ‘sax’ (McCawley 1968).

120 Kubozono, Haruowords just as it does in Type A words, the two tonal patterns would be neutralized in all words and phrases ending in a heavy syllable. For example, the TypeB word / MI.kaN/ ‘orange’ would be pronounced as /mi.KAn/, which would beindistinguishable from its Type A counterpart, e.g. /zi.KAn/ ‘time’. / NI.WA.toI/‘chicken’ would also become tonally indistinguishable from its Type A counterpart, e.g. /KE.da.MOn/ ‘wild animal’.
It may be argued here that tonal neutralization could have been avoided by
not having the H tone shift rule at all in Type A.13 This strategy does certainly
help to keep the tonal contrast at the word level, e.g. /puU.ru/ ‘pool’ (Type A)
vs. /TOo.FU/ ‘bean curd’ (Type B), but it leads to tonal neutralization at thesentence level, due to the H2 deletion process to be discussed in section 4b­elow. For example, / ke.da.mon-ga/ ‘wild animal-NOM’ (Type A) and /ni.wa.
toi-ga/ ‘chicken-NOM’ (Type B) would become tonally indistinguishable atthe sentence level if H tone shift should not occur in the former: /KE.DA.moNga/ → /KE.DA.mon-ga/ vs. / NI.WA.toi-GA/ → / NI.WA.toi-ga/.
Seen in this light, the asymmetry in question can be attributed to a force to
avoid tonal neutralization in the two-pattern system. Another argument for
positing such a force will be presented in section 4.4 below.
4.
4.1.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima JapanesePhonological dominance

The foregoing discussion has clarified some peculiarities in the two-patternsystem of Koshikijima Japanese, which are not shared by the two-pattern system of Kagoshima Japanese. First, the Koshikijima system has two H tones
rather than one in the basic patterns: H1L1H2L 2 (Type A) and H1L1H2 (Type B).
In both tonal types, both H1 and H2 are linked with phonological materials inthree-mora or longer words. Second, H1 and H2 are usually separated by a L
tone (L1), which is associated with a single syllable (see footnote 11 above foran exceptional case). Third, and most interestingly, H1 and H2 are assigned indifferent ways: H2 is associated with a particular mora, while H1 is assigned to
one or more syllables at the beginning of the word.
Despite these peculiarities, Koshikijima Japanese is identical to its sister
dialect of Kagoshima in assigning the basic tonal patterns from the right edgeof the word. What this means in Koshikijima Japanese is that the domain of H1
can be determined only after the position of H2 has been determined. This canbe seen very clearly from the examples in (16) and (17), both of which compare the prosody of a phrase with that of its colloquial form.
13. I thank Jeroen van de Weijer for pointing out this possibility.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 121(16) Type A
a. KE.DA.mo.NO-ga ‘animal-NOM’
b. KE.da.MOn-ga ‘animal-NOM (colloquial)’(17) Type B
a. NI.WA.TO.ri-GA ‘chicken-NOM’
b. NI.WA.toi-GA ‘chicken-NOM (colloquial)’
H2 is assigned to / NO/ in (16a) but to / MO/ in (16b) since the penultimate
mora in the latter is the second mora of a heavy syllable. This difference yields
a difference in the position of L1: /mo/ in (16a) vs. /da/ in (16b). This, in turn,gives rise to a difference in the domain of H1: /KE.DA/ in (16a) vs. /KE/ in(16b). Seen conversely, the domain of H1 cannot be defined unless one looks
ahead towards the end of the relevant phrase.
This is essentially true of (17), too, where H1 spreads over the first threes­yllables in (17a) but over the first two syllables in its colloquial form in (17b).
This difference reflects the fact that the penultimate syllable, which is L toned,
is /ri/ and /toi/, respectively. In this case, too, the domain of H1 can be c­omputed
only after the position of H2 is determined. This whole process of tonal assignment can be understood very well if it is described in a derivational way, as
shown in (18).14(18) a.

Type A

Input

ke.da.mo.no-ga]A

ke.da.mon-ga]A

Step 1 (H2 determined)

ke.da.mo.NO-ga(ke.da.moN-ga→)ke.da.MOn-ga

Step 2 (H1 determined)

KE.DA.mo.NO-ga

KE.da.MOn-ga

Input

ni.wa.to.ri-ga]B

ni.wa.toi-ga]BStep 1 (H2 determined)

ni.wa.to.ri-GA

ni.wa.toi-GA

Step 2 (H1 determined)

NI.WA.TO.ri-GA

NI.WA.toi-GA

b. Type B

In sum, H1 occurs concomitantly with H2 in Koshikijima Japanese. H2 isprimarily responsible for the lexical distinction between Type A and Type B,
while H1 signals this distinction only redundantly. This point turns out to bevery crucial when we compare word-level and sentence-level forms in the next
section.
14. ]A and ]B mean that the word/phrase belongs to Type A or Type B, respectively.

122 Kubozono, Haruo
4.2. H tone deletion
So far, we have restricted our discussion to the prosody of words and phrases
when they are pronounced in isolation, i.e. as a one-word/phrase sentence. The
situation becomes more complicated if one examines how words and phrases
are pronounced within a sentence. In sentence-level phonology, each phrase
can have only one peak except in sentence-final position.15 In other words, oneof the two H tones must undergo deletion in sentence-medial position. Surprisingly, it is always the second H tone (H2) that is the target of deletion.16 This H
tone deletion process is described in (19)–(20), where the mora affected by thisprocess is underlined. (21) schematically shows this process, whereas Figure 2

Figure 2. Typical F0 contours of / NI.WA.toI/ ‘chicken’ in two positions, sentence-final and nonfinal.

15. A reviewer asks whether this positional distinction is based on the sentence or the utterance.
We tentatively generalize the data here on the basis of the sentence since H tone deletion
seems to readily occur in utterance-final phrases involving a long pause or hesitation.
16. A single-peak phrase remains intact, i.e. keeps its sole peak, in any context. Thus, /a.ME-ga/‘candy-NOM’ and /me-GA/ ‘eye-NOM’ do not undergo H tone deletion even if followed byanother phrase in a sentence: /a.ME-ga # yo.KA/ ‘The candy is good’, /me.GA # yo.KA/ ‘The
eye is good. (He) has a good eyesight’.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 123
compares the F0 patterns of the Type B word / NI.WA.toI/ in final and non-final
positions.
(19) Type A
a. / ke.da.mo.no/ vs. / ke.da.mon/ ‘animal’b.

Position /Input

ke.da.mo.no]A

ke.da.mon]A

Sentence-final

KE.da.MO.no.

KE.da.MOn.

Sentence non-final

KE.da.mo.no #yan.NEe‘It’s an animal’

KE.da.mon #yan.NEe‘It’s an animal’/ ke.da.mo.no-ga/ vs. / ke.da.mon-ga/ ‘animal-NOM’

Position /Input

ke.da.mo.no-ga]A

ke.da.mon-ga]ASentence-final

KE.DA.mo.NO-ga.

KE.da.MOn-ga.

Sentence non-final

KE.DA.mo.no-ga #yo.KA‘(The) animal is good’

KE.da.mon-ga #yo.KA‘(The) animal is good’(20) B-type words
a. /ni.wa.to.ri/ vs. /ni.wa.toi/ ‘chicken’b.

Position /Input

ni.wa.to.ri]B

ni.wa.toi-ga]BSentence-final

NI.WA.to.RI.

NI.WA.toI.

Sentence non-final

NI.WA.to.ri #yan.NEe‘It’s a chicken’

NI.WA.toi #yan.NEe‘It’s a chicken’/ni.wa.to.ri-ga/ vs. /ni.wa.toi-ga/ ‘chicken-NOM’
Position /Input

ni.wa.to.ri-ga]B

ni.wa.toi-ga]BSentence-final

NI.WA.TO.ri-GA.

NI.WA.toi-GA.

Sentence non-final

NI.WA.TO.ri-ga #yo.KA‘(The) chicken is good’

NI.WA.toi-ga #yo.KA‘(The) chicken is good’(21) High tone deletion in non-final position
a. Type A		 sentence-final
sentence-non-final
		 x x x x x.
x x x x x. . . .
| | | || |				
H1L1H2L2
H1L1∅

124 Kubozono, Haruo
b. Type B		 sentence-final
		 x x x x x.
| | |
		
		
H1L1H2sentence-non-finalx x x x x. . . .
| |
H1L1∅

Note here that the H tone deletion process does not neutralize the two tonal
patterns in non-final position. Although it is impossible to predict how many
word-initial syllables are high-toned either in Type A or in Type B, as we will
see shortly below, these tonal patterns nevertheless remain distinct from eachother even when H2 is absent in non-final position. As shown in (21), the domain of H1 is one syllable longer in Type B than in Type A if all other phonological structures are identical such as word length (i.e. the number of moras)
and the syllabic composition of the word. In this sense, H1 plays a distinctiverole in non-final position.
Returning to the H tone deletion process per se, this process presents a challenging case, i.e. a case of ‘opacity’ (cf. Kiparsky 1973). In word-level phonology, H2 dominates H1 in the sense that the domain of H1 can be defined onlywith reference to the position of H2. In sentence-level phonology, however, H1
dominates H2 in that H2, but not H1, is suppressed in non-final position. In thissystem, the roles of H tones also change between word-level and sentencelevel phonology.17 At the word level, the position of H2 plays a distinctive roleby which Type A and Type B are distinguished from each other. At the sentencelevel, on the other hand, the distinctive role is played by H1, whereas H2 only
serves as a boundary tone signaling the end of the sentence18. We will analyze
this paradoxical situation in the next two subsections.
4.3.

Lexical vs. boundary tone

The paradoxical situation in question is due primarily to the observation that
H2 is a distinctive tone at the word level but undergoes deletion at the sentencelevel. One way of solving this problem may be to assume that H2 is not al­exical tone and, hence, that the peculiar rule of H tone deletion does not exist
17. We can compare this situation with rhythmic stress shift in English words, where the primarystress determines the location of a secondary stress, but undergoes deletion (or reduction)i­tself in stress-clash environments at the phrasal/sentence level: e.g. Jàpanése vs. Jàpanesepéople (Liberman and Prince 1977). I owe this comment to Carlos Gussenhoven.
18. Other boundary tones in this dialect (and also in Kagoshima Japanese) include a sentence-final
L tone for questions. This tone is simply superimposed on lexical tones and triggers pitch
lowering on a lengthened final vowel in interrogative sentences: e.g. / NI.WA.to.RI/ ‘chicken’
vs. / NI.WA.to.RIi/ ‘chicken?’; /KE.da.MO.no/ ‘wild animal’ vs. /KE.da.MO.noo/ ‘wild animal?’. There are no sentence-initial boundary tones in this dialect.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 125
at all. This alternative analysis posits only H1 as a lexical tone and assumes that
H2 is inserted as a boundary tone in sentence-final position rather than being
deleted in non-final position.19 This analysis sounds quite reasonable since thesentence-final position is often a target of many phonological and/or phonetic
processes across languages involving, for instance, question prosody and sentence-final lengthening. In other words, sentence-medial positions generally
show a default prosodic pattern of words and phrases, which is often modified
by a boundary tone in sentence-final position.
Under this analysis, the picture given in (19–21) will be reversed, and thesecond H tone (H2) is inserted in sentence-final position as a boundary tone
rather than being deleted in non-final position. This is illustrated in (22).
(22) a.
		
		
		
		
		
		

word level			 b. sentence level (sentence-final position)(Type A)
KE.da.mo.no →			KE.da.MO.no ‘wild animal’
KE.da.mon→		KE.da.MOn ‘wild animal (colloquial)’(Type B)
NI.WA.to.ri→		
NI.WA.to.RI ‘chicken’
NI.WA.toi→		
NI.WA.to.I ‘chicken (colloquial)’

While this analysis seems quite orthodox, it runs into several difficulties
if the data are analyzed more carefully. In the first place, it needs to refer tolexical information of words in sentence-level phonology in such a way that it
assigns the boundary tone, H2, to the penultimate mora in Type A words and to
the final mora in Type B words. In other words, this analysis ends up assuming that the sentence-level rule of H tone insertion is sensitive to lexical tonal
distinctions.
A more serious problem with the alternative analysis in (22) is that it cannot
define the domain of H1 in a general way. The examples in (22) may suggestthat H1 is linked with the initial syllable in Type A words, /KE.da.mo.no/ and/KE.da.mon/, and with the initial two syllables in Type B words, / NI.WA.to.ri/
and / NI.WA.toi/. Alternatively, it may also be possible to generalize that H1 islinked with the fourth mora from the end of the word and spreads leftwards in
Type A, whereas it is linked with the antepenultimate mora and spreads leftwards in Type B. These generalizations, however, do not apply to many otherwords and phrases. Some examples are shown in (23), where sentence-final
forms are given in parentheses for comparison.
(23) a.
				Type A
SU.to.rai.ki (SU.to.RAi.ki) ‘strike’
PII.tii.ee (PII.tii.Ee) ‘PTA’

19. A reviewer has attracted my attention to this alternative analysis.

126 Kubozono, Haruo
		
		
		
b.
		
		
		

PII.E.ru.oo (PII.E.ru.Oo) ‘PLO’
KE.DA.mo.no-ga (KE.DA.mo.NO-ga) ‘wild animal-NOM’
KE.da.mon-ga (KE.da.MOn-ga) ‘wild animal-NOM (colloquial)’
Type B
NI.hon.sya ( NI.hon.SYA) ‘Japanese car’MI.kan-ga (MI.kan-GA) ‘orange-NOM’
NI.WA.toi-ga ( NI.WA.toi-GA) ‘chicken-NOM (colloquial)’

The main reason for the failure to capture the generalization correctly is thatthe domain of H1 is entirely dependent on the position of H2, but not vice versa.
The non-final forms in (19)–(20) and (23) can therefore be determined on thebasis of their corresponding sentence-final forms. This means that the analysisin (22) is wrong and that both of the two H tones in sentence-final forms arelexical tones, not boundary ones. This, in turn, supports the idea of H tone deletion in non-final position.
4.4. Word-level and sentence-level interaction
The preceding discussion raises a challenging and difficult question: why does
H2 delete although it is a lexically distinctive tone that defines the domain of
H1 at the word level? Although this question remains largely unsolved, it isworth considering phonological factors behind the sentence-level process bydiscussing how word-level prosodic structure interacts with sentence-levelstructure. To do this, it is vital to compare our data with the data that Kamimura(1937, 1941) presented in his report seventy years ago.20
There are several crucial differences between Kamimura’s and our data.
First of all, Kamimura (1937, 1941) does not mention H2 deletion in his report,
which suggests that this process is a rather new development in the prosodic
system of Koshikijima Japanese. Secondly, the domain of H1 differs between
our data and Kamimura’s. In Kamimura’s data, the default location of H1 is thesecond mora of the word in both A-type and B-type, and does not move or
spread either to the left or to the right even in long words (Kamimura 1941:
13). In this system, H1 is independent of H2 and does not function to distinguish between the two tonal types. This is exemplified below.
(24) Type A
Type Bna.TU.ya.SU.mi ‘summer holiday’ ha.RU.ya.su.MI ‘spring holiday’
mu.KA.si.ba.NA.si ‘old tale’
i.RO.en.pi.TU ‘color pencil’

20. Kamimura says that his data and description cover all major villages on the KoshikijimaI­slands, including Teuchi, where our data were collected.

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 127
In the present-day system, in comparison, H1 can spread over more than one
syllable at the beginning of the word and, more crucially, is dependent on H2:
the two H tones are separated by one and only one low-toned syllable. As aconsequence, H1 as well as H2 bears a distinctive role. This can be seen fromthe present-day counterparts of the words in (24), given in (25).
(25) Type A
Type B
NA.TU.ya.SU.mi ‘summer holiday’ HA.RU.YA.su.MI ‘spring h­oliday’
MU.KA.SI.ba.NA.si ‘old tale’
I.RO.EN.pi.TU ‘color pencil’
The two crucial differences between Kamimura’s system seventy years ago
and our system today are not unrelated with each other. On the contrary, they
are closely tied with each other since H2 deletion would have neutralized thetwo tonal patterns, Type A and Type B, in the old system as shown in (26). In
other words, H2 deletion at the sentence level could not have occurred inK­amimura’s old system because of potential tonal neutralization between the
two tonal patterns. This is another piece of evidence for positing a force to
avoid neutralization in the prosodic system of Koshikijima Japanese.
(26) Hypothetical H2 deletion in Kamimura’s systema. Type A
		 na.TU.ya.SU.mi → na.TU.ya.su.mi
		 mu.KA.si.ba.NA.si → mu.KA.si.ba.na.si
b. Type B		 ha.RU.ya.su.MI → ha.RU.ya.su.mi
		 i.RO.en.pi.TU → i.RO.en.pi.tu
Seen in this light, it is possible to understand why the H tone deletion rule
was absent in the old system but can be present in the current system.21 The
pivotal factor that prompted this sentence-level process is the word-levelchange that affected the domain of H1. While it remains unclear why H1 haschanged its domain from (24) to (25), it is clear that this word-level change
was a prerequisite for the sentence-level process of H2 deletion. This presents
an interesting case showing how a word-level process can interact with as­entence-level process.
21. Note that this historical development has made the endangered system of Koshikijima Japanese more complex in terms of ‘opacity’, but simpler in terms of tonal representations: tonal
representations at the sentence level are much simpler now than they were seventy years ago
due to H tone deletion in non-final positions. This means that the historical development inquestion cannot be regarded as a counterexample to the general observation that language loss
is usually accompanied by phonological simplification.

128 Kubozono, Haruo
5.

Conclusion

This paper discussed word-level and sentence-level prosody of the K­oshikijima
Japanese, one of the endangered Japanese dialects that has not been studied in
depth. Like other dialects in the same geographical area, this dialect has a twopattern prosodic system, a system with two lexically contrastive tonal patterns.
We analyzed this particular dialect as having two basic tonal patterns –H1L1H2L 2 (Type A) and H1L1H2 (Type B) – either of which is underlyingly
given to any morpheme.
In the first half of this paper, we presented an overall picture of the dialect’s
prosodic system, including its compound accent rule and the assignment of thebasic tonal patterns to words. Particularly interesting here was the interaction
between the mora and the syllable: the first two tones in the basic tonal patterns– H1L1 – are assigned syllable by syllable, whereas the remaining tones –H2(L 2) – are assigned on the basis of the mora. Specifically, the second H tone
(H2) in each tonal pattern is assigned to a particular mora, the L tone (L1) preceding this H tone is associated with the immediately preceding syllable, andthe initial H tone (H1) is linked with the remaining syllables at the beginningof words. It is interesting to ask why only the final H(L) tones are quantitysensitive.
The second half of the paper discussed the paradoxical relationship between
H1 and H2. At the word level, H2 is distinctive and, moreover, determines thedomain of H1. In this sense, H2 dominates H1 in the word domain. At the sentence level, however, H2 is deleted except in sentence-final position. What thismeans is that at the sentence level, H1 comes to bear a lexically distinctive role,
while H2 (if manifested) serves as a boundary tone signaling the end of thesentence. We analyzed this case from a historical point of view by comparing
our data with the data that were reported some seventy years ago (Kamimura
1937, 1941). This comparison revealed an interesting interaction between
word-level and sentence-level processes, suggesting that a word-level prosodicchange that modified the domain of H1 was a prerequisite for the sentencelevel process by which H2 is deleted in non-final position.
This study has revealed several interesting questions for future work ina­ddition to those that have been pointed out above. One of them concerns thehistorical relationship between the prosodic system of Koshikijima and that ofits sister dialect, i.e. Kagoshima. It will be very interesting to ask which system
is older, that is, whether the more complex tonal patterns of the former(H1L1H2L 2 and H1L1H2) have developed out of the simpler patterns of the latter (L1H1L 2 and L1H1) or the former system has been simplified into the latterone. It will also be important to explore the functional reason(s) for the peculiar H tone deletion process discussed in section 4, especially in comparison
with rhythmic stress shift in English and other stress-accent languages. Fur-

Word-level vs. sentence-level prosody in Koshikijima Japanese 129
thermore, how to formulate the major tonal patterns and rules in a more theoretical framework, notably the non-derivational Optimality-theoretic framework (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), also remains an important issue for
future research.
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyokubozono@ninjal.ac.jp
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