Doctoral Dissertation Research: Category Structure of Pitch Accent in the Mid-Western Japanese Dialects

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Pitch is the resource used to distinguish notes in music, and it is also a ubiquitous aspect of the sound system of different languages. Languages use pitch for numerous functions, from marking off phrases and forming questions, as in English, to differentiating words. This study investigates pitch accent systems in six dialects of Japanese, which are known to rely heavily on pitch contrasts for the identification and differentiation of words. These dialects are notable for a particularly complex use of vocal pitch, called "shiki". Shiki have been described variously as local pitch specifications at the beginning of a word, and as a more global movement of pitch throughout a word. Since most current phonological representations of sounds rely on elements that represent sound locally, the dynamic and global aspects of shiki present something of a challenge to typical representational schemes. This research will determine the nature of shiki contrasts in different dialects that are known to exhibit different inventories of shiki. One other aspect of the dialects of central Japan is that they exhibit many different shiki and accent systems, forming a natural typological sample of the different ways in which shiki and accent types can be differentiated to mark different words. The study begins with the collection of recordings of different shiki-accent types in six different varieties scattered about the inland waterways of central Japan. These recordings are then submitted to acoustic analysis, with the construction of dynamic models of the time-course of pitch control. These models reduce the complex movement patterns to a set of parameters that can be examined for how they capture the word contrasts in the different dialects. It will also include a perceptual component in which these model parameters are used to create synthetic speech for perceptual evaluation by speakers of these dialects in a later field-work stage. The goal, then, is to determine those characteristics of the fundamental frequency F0 that speakers control in speech production and pay attention to in speech perception. The findings will inform the question of how linguistic systems use pitch and the typology of pitch systems cross-linguistically. The study will also contribute to our understanding of how speakers can maintain distinct shiki systems in different accents, since there are so many different and complex systems distributed over a relatively small geographic area. In addition, this research holds promise to open up new conceptualizations of the nature of pitch control, and how it should be represented in studies of pitch usage. This is relevant not only for studies of word contrasts in languages such as Japanese, but also intonational studies of languages such as English. Perhaps most importantly though, the study serves the valuable purpose of documenting several endangered dialects of Japanese. For example, the Ibukijima dialect, localized on a small island in the inland sea of Japan, is the only known dialect that maintains the same type of system as reconstructed for Old Japanese. However, the speakers of an authentic Ibukijima dialect are few in number and over seventy years of age. This study will document the speech of the dialect before this heritage is gone forever.