Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology

Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology
Author: Haruo Kubozono
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 808
Release: 2015-03-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1614511985

This volume is the first comprehensive handbook of Japanese phonetics and phonology describing the basic phonetic and phonological structures of modern Japanese with main focus on standard Tokyo Japanese. Its primary goal is to provide a comprehensive overview and descriptive generalizations of major phonetic and phonological phenomena in modern Japanese by reviewing important studies in the fields over the past century. It also presents a summary of interesting questions that remain unsolved in the literature. The volume consists of eighteen chapters in addition to an introduction to the whole volume. In addition to providing descriptive generalizations of empirical phonetic/phonological facts, this volume also aims to give an overview of major phonological theories including, but not restricted to, traditional generative phonology, lexical phonology, prosodic morphology, intonational phonology, and the more recent Optimality Theory. It also touches on theories of speech perception and production. This book serves as a comprehensive guide to Japanese phonetics and phonology for all interested in linguistics and speech sciences.

A Reference Grammar of Japanese

A Reference Grammar of Japanese
Author: Samuel E. Martin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 1202
Release: 2003-11-30
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 082484386X

Have you ever wondered about a Japanese sentence your textbook fails to explain? Do you feel unsure about the use of "wa," "ga," and "mo?" Or what the rules and meanings of words in their literary forms are? If so, you will find your answers in A Reference Grammar of Japanese, the most comprehensive and reliable reference source available. With an extensive 105-page index, the reader will quickly find explanations for particles such as wa, ga, mo, ni, and de; difficult nouns such as mono, koto, tokoro, wake, hazu, and tame; sentence extensions such as ne, yo, sa, yara,and nari; verb tenses, literary forms, negative forms--in short, everything concerned with the Japanese language. For the serious student, this book is indispensable for clearing up the ambiguities of puzzling Japanese sentences.

Japanese Morphophonemics

Japanese Morphophonemics
Author: Junko Itō
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2003
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780262590235

The first book-length treatment of Japanese phonology from the perspective of Optimality Theory.

The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants

The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants
Author: Haruo Kubozono
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2017-04-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0191071102

This book is the first volume specifically devoted to the phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants, a feature of many of the world's languages including Arabic, Bengali, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Persian, Saami, Swiss German, and Turkish. While the contrast between geminate and singleton consonants has been widely studied, the phonetic manifestation and phonological nature of geminate consonants, as well as their cross-linguistic similarities and differences, are not fully understood. The volume brings together original data and novel analyses of geminate consonants in a variety of languages across the world. Experts in the field present a wide range of approaches to the study of phonological contrasts in general by introducing various experimental and non-experimental methodologies; they also discuss phonological contrasts in a wider context and examine the behaviour of geminate consonants in loanword phonology and language acquisition. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on experimental phonetics, theoretical phonology, speech processing, neurolinguistics, and language acquisition.

Perspectives on Morphological Organization

Perspectives on Morphological Organization
Author: Ferenc Kiefer
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2017-06-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004342931

This volume contains a selection of recent theoretical studies, deriving from presentations at the 16th International Morphology Meeting (Budapest, 2014), on the organization of morphological paradigms, paradigm complexity, and the inflectional marking of morphosyntactic relations, as well as on the application of information theory to the analysis of morphological systems aiming to achieve a clearer understanding of the close relation between notions of ‘morphological information’ based on ‘uncertainty’ and ‘uncertainty reduction’ and the error-driven structure of discriminative learning models.

Optimality Theory in Phonology

Optimality Theory in Phonology
Author: John J. McCarthy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0470755520

Optimality Theory in Phonology: A Reader is a collection of readings on this important new theory by leading figures in the field, including a lengthy excerpt from Prince and Smolensky’s never-before-published Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Compiles the most important readings about Optimality Theory in phonology from some of the most prominent researchers in the field. Contains 33 excerpts spanning a range of topics in phonology and including many never-before-published papers. Includes a lengthy excerpt from Prince and Smolensky’s foundational 1993 manuscript Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Includes introductory notes and study/research questions for each chapter.

Numeral Classifier Systems

Numeral Classifier Systems
Author: Pamela A. Downing
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 358
Release: 1996-09-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027276110

Numeral Classifier Systems considers the functional significance of the Japanese numeral system, its conclusions based on a corpus of 500 uses of classifier constructions drawn from oral and written Japanese texts. Interestingly, although the Japanese system appears to conform at least superficially to universalistic predictions about its semantic structure, this study reports that in actual usage, the semantic role of classifiers is slight — only very rarely do they carry any lexical information unavailable from the context or the noun with which the classifier occurs. It does appear, however, that the system has an important role to play in providing pronoun-like anaphoric elements and in marking pragmatic distinctions such as the individuatedness of referents and the newness of numerical information. For these reasons, the classifier system is deeply involved in a number of subsystems of Japanese grammar, and the demise of the system (sometimes rumored to be impending) would have substantial implications for the structure of the language as a whole.