Word and Sentence Prosody: The Endangered Dialect of Koshikijima Japanese

This is the first comprehensive work on word and sentence prosody in  Koshikijima Japanese, a dialect of Japanese not fully documented in the  literature. It is an endangered dialect spoken by about 2,000 speakers  on a small southern island in Japan. Being separated from mainland  dialects by the sea, this dialect exhibits unique prosodic features not  shared by other Japanese dialects. It also exhibits considerable  regional variations among the ten or more small villages that were  isolated from each other until recently. Based on the author’s  fieldwork, the book analyzes word accent and intonation, the two  linguistic areas in which this endangered dialect exhibits unique  features and remarkable regional variations within itself. They include  the emergence and development of a secondary H tone, postlexical  deletion of the primary H tone, and the L boundary tone in question and  vocative intonation. These phenomena bear crucially on general issues in  prosody, including postlexical tonal neutralizations, competitions  between lexical and postlexical tones, and the number of tones that a  syllable can maximally bear. The book thus demonstrates the relevance of  studying an endangered language/dialect in general linguistic contexts.