Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the diverse prosody of compound nouns in Kansai Japanese, with a special focus on a class of compounds with particularly variable prosody, whose unique prosody is potentially endangered due to their structure and influence from Tokyo Japanese. These compounds serve as important evidence for recursion in prosodic structure in theories of the syntax-prosody interface, as they simultaneously resemble not only other compound words but also non-compound phrases, making them valuable test cases for compound prosodic structure. This book discusses potential reasons for these compounds' prosodic variabilty and what may condition their unique prosody, based on results from novel fieldwork. A unified account of compound prosody in Kansai and three other Japanese dialects is also presented.
Table of ContentsContents Preface Acknowledgments List of Figures and Tables 1 Introduction 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Overview of the Book 1.3 Background on Japanese Phonology 1.4 The Syntax-Prosody Interface and Match Theory 1.5 Compounds 2 Accent 2.1 Pitch Accent or Tone? 2.2 Accent and Tone Bearing Units 2.3 Characteristics of the Accentual Systems of Tokyo, Kansai, Kagoshima, and Nagasaki Japanese in Simplex Words 2.4 Introduction to Japanese Compounds 2.5 Overview of Tokyo, Kagoshima, Nagasaki, and Kansai Japanese Compound Words 3 The Syntax-Prosody of Japanese Compounds 3.1 The Syntax of Japanese Compounds 3.2 The Syntactic Structure of Japanese Compounds 3.3 Prosodic Structures and Prosodic Categories 3.4 Non-right-headed Compounds 4 Kansai Japanese Compound Accentuation 4.1 Register Inheritance and Accent Loss – Overview and Analysis 4.2 Word Compounds and the Necessity of Junctural Alignment 4.3 Symmetrical Phrasal Compounds 4.4 A Deeper Look at the Word-Phrase Compound 4.5 Implications for a Theory of the Syntax-Prosody Interface 5 Where Do Word-Phrase Compounds Come From? 5.1 The N2 Length Problem and the No Unique Word-Phrase Parse Problem 5.2 Discovering Additional Conditioning Factors on the Word-Phrase Parse 5.3 Novel Fieldwork on the Word-Phrase Parse 6 Conclusion Appendix 1: List of Constraints Appendix 2: Full Candidate Sets Appendix 3: List of Nakai Compounds Bibliography Index of Modern Authors Index of Subjects Index of Constraints and Constraint Families Index of Language Names
