The interrogative intonation in the Kunigami dialect of Okinoerabu, Ryukyu
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Akiko Yokoyama
Abstract
Cross-linguistically, intonation patterns for yes/no questions rise in many languages. However, there are multiple reports of interrogative sentences with falling intonation in Japanese dialects. It is said that five types of interrogative intonation exist in Japanese dialects: rising, where the end of the sentence always rises; falling 1, where the end of the sentence always falls; falling 2, where the interrogative appears morphologically in the sentence, and the sentence falls; complement, where tone in the sentence falls if the interrogative morphologically appears and rises if it does not; and gradual rise, where the tone gradually rises until the end of the sentence. However, the Kunigami dialect does not adhere to these patterns. In Kunigami yes/no questions, the tone falls if an interrogative morphologically appears but reveals a distinctive intonation from a declarative sentence if it does not. Therefore, in the case of Kunigami, the interrogative intonation typology should not be reconstructed on the basis of absolute rise or fall but on the basis of contrast with a declarative sentence.
Funding source: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Award Identifier / Grant number: 17J04617
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the reviewers for the useful discussions. I am grateful to Yosuke Igarashi for the insightful advice on the original work of this article. I also would like to thank Nobuko Kibe, Kohei Nakazawa, and Kumiko Sato for their useful comments. Finally, I would like to appreciate Enago (www.enago.jp) for the English language review.
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Research funding: This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellow (17J04617).
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Is discourse made up of sentences? Focusing on dependent grafted speech in modern standard Japanese
- Correlating cognitive effort and noun role in spoken Japanese
- A formal approach to role language: sentence-final particles and the speaker-hearer link
- Discourse functions and pitch patterns of the Japanese interactional particle yo in student-professor conversation
- The interrogative intonation in the Kunigami dialect of Okinoerabu, Ryukyu
- Book Reviews
- Wesley M. Jacobsen and Yukinori Takubo: Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics
- Hisashi Noda: Nihongo to sekai no gengo no toritate-hyōgen
- Mayumi Usami: Shizen kaiwa bunseki e no goyōronteki apurōchi: BTSJ kōpasu o riyōshite
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Is discourse made up of sentences? Focusing on dependent grafted speech in modern standard Japanese
- Correlating cognitive effort and noun role in spoken Japanese
- A formal approach to role language: sentence-final particles and the speaker-hearer link
- Discourse functions and pitch patterns of the Japanese interactional particle yo in student-professor conversation
- The interrogative intonation in the Kunigami dialect of Okinoerabu, Ryukyu
- Book Reviews
- Wesley M. Jacobsen and Yukinori Takubo: Handbook of Japanese Semantics and Pragmatics
- Hisashi Noda: Nihongo to sekai no gengo no toritate-hyōgen
- Mayumi Usami: Shizen kaiwa bunseki e no goyōronteki apurōchi: BTSJ kōpasu o riyōshite
