Startseite The empathetic utterance-final particle -ne in Japanese: a study on its phonological representation
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The empathetic utterance-final particle -ne in Japanese: a study on its phonological representation

  • Kuniya Nasukawa EMAIL logo , Ge Song und Sachiko Kiyama
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 3. Mai 2025
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Abstract

Utterance-final particles (UFPs) in Japanese can be immediately preceded by any lexical item, and can carry various tonal contours, each conveying nuanced meanings in discourse. This paper focuses on the empathetic UFP -ne, investigating its phonological representation (rather than its morphological, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic representation) based on its usage as established in the literature. While traditionally viewed as a consonant-vowel sequence, our experimental data recorded by a total of 66 typically developed native Japanese speakers reveals the empathetic -ne has a consistently longer duration than the non-empathetic -yo. This paper proposes to represent the vowel of -ne as a structural configuration containing two tone-bearing units (e.g., VV or μμ), and focuses on the infrequent use of this structure among individuals with higher autistic tendencies, specifically in terms of difficulties with social skills.


Corresponding author: Kuniya Nasukawa, Tohoku Gakuin University, Tsuchitoi 1-3-1, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8511, Japan, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the following MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI grants: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) Grant Number JP20H01269 and 24K00059, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) Grant Number JP22K00513, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) Grant Number JP19H05589, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) Grant Number JP19H00532.

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Received: 2023-12-25
Accepted: 2024-05-21
Published Online: 2025-05-03
Published in Print: 2025-05-26

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