Since 1927, we have got the “nucleus” of Japanese accentuation, significant high-pitched mora by Prof. K. Miyata's excellant work. It is said that
heibansiki (horizontal) accentuation has no nucleus. And we cannot distinguish the accentuation of one-mora word isolated, but with a particle.
I consider that, each word has a additional final mora, a staccato or a extension of vowel, which can be replaced with a particle, and has one and only nucleus, which dominates it. According to this views, we can put a nucleus on the additional final mora of the so-called non-nucleus word. It realizes Grecian order of Japanese accentuations. And then we call the horizontal one as ultima, the odakagata (high-finishing type) as paenultima, and so on.
There are contrastive sequences of morae-high and low, corresponding to the strained horizontal tone and the suppressed ascending tone in Kyoto dialect, and there are several allotones for these two sequences in some dialects. Ends of these sequences are just the nuclei. Then I postulate two species of the nucleus-high (eccentric or extensive) and low (concentric or intensive), grow as two different types of tonal sequence towards the head of the word.
Now we have two nuclei, and two are sufficient to explain various systems in all dialects. Practically a grave accent represents high nucleus and a acute one represents low one.
1) Each accentuation in Kyoto is identified with the specifidation and the orientation of the nucleus.(Turuoka: lacking high series but ultima.)
2) Tokyo: with the orientation.
3) Kagosima: with the specification, and there are merely two accentua-tions.(Miyakonozyo: lacking even specification, then only one accentuation.)
Full size of Japanese accentual system is in Koti, Kyoto, and so on. Perhaps sliding tendency of the nucleus up towards the head of the word has grown absence of the species, and sliding down towards the end has grown absence of the orientation.
An attempt to explain accentuations of Kyoto in the Middle Ages with the nucleus makes same system as today. Filling up some vacant seats in the system with assumed examples, we can reconstruct older system. And we can also agree to Kindaiti-Okumura's theory, seeing Tokyo-system as a derivative from the Middle Age Kyoto.
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