A Sociolinguistic Study of Pitch Leveling in Japanese: Hokkaido Dialect and Kagoshima Dialect as Analytical Data
| Project/Area Number |
16520284
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Japanese linguistics
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| Research Institution | Hokusei Gakuen University |
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Principal Investigator |
TAKANO Shoji Hokusei Gakuen University, English, Associate Prof., 文学部, 助教授 (00285503)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
OTA Ichiro Kagoshima University, Humanities, Professor, 法文学部, 教授 (60203783)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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| Project Status |
Completed (Fiscal Year 2006)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,500,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥2,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000)
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| Keywords | pitch leveling / Japanese / language change / variation theory / sociophonetics / prosody / sociolinguistics / perception / ピッチの平坦化 / 年齢差 |
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| Research Abstract |
This study sheds light on an ongoing generational change in Japanese prosody. It was first suggested by Sibata (1995) a decade ago that pitch in Japanese was becoming increasingly leveled in the speech of younger generations. This claim, however, was based on his limited informal observations or native intuition, and has not yet been subject to large-scale empirical investigation. This study is the first attempt to verify Sibata's thesis empirically.
The second thrust of this study lies in its research methodology. A great majority of prior studies of prosody are based exclusively on stylistically impoverished data-reading of unrelated words or sentences out of context, which is far from native speakers' everyday linguistic practices. We have tried to resolve this issue by analyzing data from multiple registers, which include short narratives that describe the sequence of events in pictures, reading of a passage as well as reading of sentences in isolation.
The third thrust of this study
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is concerned with native speakers' perception of the variant (i.e., pitch leveling); more specifically, whether native speakers can hear the leveling of pitch and associate it with the speaker's age. We took advantage of sound synthesis technique and the matched-guise experiment.
We conducted our fieldwork in two remote dialect areas of Japan, Hokkaido and Kagoshima, where two age groups (younger and older) comprised the corpus for analysis. Based on the prosody of three registers-the reading of isolated sentences and a television news passage, and short narratives of sequential events in pictures, we were able to verify Sibata's claim that the leveling of pitch has been advanced among younger speakers, and also pointed out the possibility that it is a nationwide phenomenon as part of drastic standardization involving local dialects throughout Japan. As for the issue of perception, we also succeeded in proving that native speakers in both communities associate the leveling of pitch with younger age of the speaker. Less
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Report
(4 results)
Research Products
(15 results)
