Dephrasing in Kobayashi Japanese: Is it a reality?
Yosuke Igarashi (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, National Institute for Japanese Language)
The present study reported the results of an experiment which investigated prosodic characteristics in Kobayashi Japanese spoken by the younger generation. The results revealed that 1) a mapping between syntactic branching structure and prosodic phrasing is not as clear as has been reported for other Japanese dialects, 2) wh word compresses pitch range of the following words 3) pitch range expands on the focused word concurrently with a compression on the post-focal words, and 4) even in the post-focal words, some trace of the high-tailed pattern can be detected. From result (4) it is concluded that no strong support for dephrasing can be found in Kobayashi and that this dialect can safely be regarded as a fixed accent dialect.
