MINAMIDA Hitomi
（南田　仁美）

JAPN398D:
The Sounds and Dialects of Japanese

Fall 2023;
University of Maryland, College Park

Course Description

This course is an introduction to Japanese phonetics and phonology. Topics covered in the course include the pronunciation of Japanese, basic phonological phenomena, and pitch accent. The class also covers dialectal differences and sociolinguistics. We will discuss and analyze data from authentic language materials, which native speakers of Japanese would call 生きた日本語. Through sounds, we will see that Japanese has more diverse aspects than thought. This class is designed for Japanese language learners who have no linguistic background.

Textbook

Vance, Timothy J. 2008. The sounds of Japanese. Cambridge University Press. [link]

Other Readings

Amino, Kanae, Hisanori Makinae, Toshiaki Kamada, and Takashi Osanai. 2016. Reference data on Japanese vowel devoicing: Effects of speakers' and parents' places of origin and within-speaker reproducibility. Acoustical Science and Technology 29(3), 207-214.

Igarashi, Yosuke. 2007. Pitch accent deletion and pitch range compression in Fukuoka Japanese. In Proceedings of the 21st General Meeting of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 111-116. Tokyo: Phonetic Society of Japan.

Igarashi, Yosuke. 2014. Typology of intonational phrasing in Japanese dialects. In Prosodic typology II: The phonology of intonation and phrasing, 464-492. Oxford University Press.

Irwin, Mark. 2011. Phonology. In Loanwords in Japanese, 71-136. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Kori, Shiro. 1987. The tonal behavior of Osaka Japanese: An interim report. In OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 36, 31-61.

Kubozono, Haruo. 2005. Rendaku: Its domain and linguistic conditions. In Voicing in Japanese, 5-24. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Minamida, Hitomi. 2020. Prosody and wh-scope in Osaka Japanese. In Japanese/Korean Linguistics 27, 239–253. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Minamida, Hitomi. 2023. Wh-prosody, locality, and lexical pitch accent in wh-in-situ languages. Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University.

Pierrehumbert, Janet, and Mary Beckman. 1988. Japanese tone structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Course Schedule

Week 1
M 8/28: Introduction [slides]

W 8/30: English consonants [slides]
Week 2
W 9/6: English vowels and Praat [slides]
Week 3
W 9/11: English phonology [slides] W 9/13: Japanese vowels [slides]
Week 4
M 9/18: Japanese syllable-initial consonants [slides] W 9/20: Japanese syllable-final consonants [slides]
Week 5
M 9/25: Syllables and moras [slides] W 9/27: Loanword phonology [slides]
Week 6
M 10/2: Vowel devoicing [slides] W 10/4: Vowel devoicing in Osaka Japanese [slides]
Week 7
M 10/9: Syllable-initial velar nasals (鼻濁音) [slides] W 10/11: Syllable-initial velar nasals (鼻濁音) in (traditional) Tokyo Japanese [slides]
Week 8
M 10/16: Sequential voicing (連濁) [slides] W 10/18: Exam review

Week 9
M 10/23: Romanization (and Pokémonastics) [slides] W 10/25: No class
Week 10
M 10/30: Tokyo pitch accent (乙種) 1: Nouns [slides] W 11/1: Tokyo pitch accent (乙種) 2: Verbs and adjectives [slides]
Week 11
M 11/6: Tokyo pitch accent (乙種) 3: Longer phrases [slides] W 11/8: Osaka pitch accent (甲種) 1: Nouns [slides]
Week 12
M 11/13: Osaka pitch accent (甲種) 2: Verbs, adjectives, and longer phrases [slides]

W 11/15: Intonational phonology [slides]
Week 13
M 11/20: Pitch accent exercise

Week 14
M 11/27: Pitch accent in other dialects [slides] W 11/29: Pitch accent–Other topics [slides]
Week 15
M 12/4: Wh-prosody and focus [slides] W 12/6: Wh-prosody and interpretation [slides]
Week 16
M 12/11: Final project presentation