Language, i. e. spoken language, is one aspect of human activity. A human being communicates with others in daily life, and language is one of the media of their communication. However, it is not a thing outside of him, but a phonomenon found in his activity itself.
It is a social custom learned after his birth, but his mother influences him not only after the birth, but also possibly when he is still in her womb.
A human being can easily become bilingual, trilingual, etc, if he learns the languages probably before his puberty. Adult people, however, find it difficult to learn a foreign language. It is necessary to scientifically confirm when and how his ability of learning his mother tongue solidifies.
There are a few people who can exactly recite extremely long poems or historical legends, but everyone does not have such an ability. However, everyone can freely speak his native language.
The languages in the world have various structures and systems, but certain circumstances necessitate them to have common features.
Utterances can be short, long, or extremely long. One utterance includes one or more sentences, and one sentence includes one or more words. Why has an utterance such a structure?
It is impossible to memorize whole sentences uttered by various people, to say nothing of whole utterances, because kinds of sentences are almost infinite and there is no limit of the length of sentences. However, one language has a finite set of words, and everyone can learn before his puberty the basic vocabulary at least with the grammatical rules which combine words into sentences.
Words are combinations of a meaning (a concept) with a sound-shape. Children automatically acquire the concepts of the things and events in daily life, and they learn to combine a concept with a sound-shape which is approved by the linguistic community.
In order to discriminate several thousand words of one language, the sound-shapes of words necessarily have some definite structure. Therefore, they are combinations of syllables, which consist of one or more consonants plus a vowel or a diphthong (plus one or more consonants).
The set of consonants or vowels (and diphthongs) is not a random one, but a systematic one, so that it is easy to memorize them.
The sets of consonants and vowels can be systematic on account of the distictive features, which are very easy for a human being to memorize, because they are due to the articulations which are innately possible for him.

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‘Cours’ spricht uber den Wert der Sprache fast jedesmal so, als gehörte er entweder der synchronischen Phase der Sprache an oder aber ihrer diachronischen. Aber das ist durchaus falsch, das widerspricht nämlich den Definitionen, die der ‘Cours’ selbst zur Sprache an sich oder zu ihrer Grundphase, zu ihrer synchronischen und zu ihrer diachronischen Phase gibt. Da (nach LOMMELS Übersetzung S. 108) heiBt es: Die Sprache ist “eine soziale Institution”. Und jedes soziale Gesetz hat “zwei grundlegende Eigenschaften: es ist befehlend und allgemein”(d. h. Imperativität+; Generalität+).“Das synchronische Gesetz gilt allgemein, aber es hat nicht befehlende Kraft”(Imperativität-; Generalität+), und dem diachronischen fehlt beides (LOM. S. 110. Imperativität-; Generalität-). Die Sprache der Grundphase₁ und die Sprache der synchronischen Phase₂ sind aber nun völlig verschieden!
Unserer Meinung nach wird der Wert der Sprache ausschließlich und allein konstituiert unter der Rückendeckung der Imperativität, die die einzelne Sprachgemeinschaft der Sprache selbst oder ihrer Grundphase verleiht, nicht dagegen ihrer synchronischen oder ihrer diachronischen Phase. Die Gültigkeit, die die Sprache in ihrer Grundphase bekommt, heißt ihrem Inhalt nach ‘Wert’. Der Wert der Sprache gehört daher ausschließlich der Sprache selbst an, nicht aber ihrer Synchronie noch der Diachronie.
‘Im Anfang war das Wort’, die Sprache. Auch der Wert der Sprache muß schon im Anfang und von Anfang an präsent gewesen sein.

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According to early autosegmental treatments of pitch-accent languages, such as Goldsmith (1976), Haraguchi (1977, 1978, 1979), each pitch-accent language has a finite number of Basic Tone Melodies, and tones are mapped to tone bearing units with regard to the universal convention known as the Well Formedness Condition. Rather than the concept of Basic Tone Melody, the present paper, basically continuing on from the idea given by Pulleyblank (1983), suggests that each tone is introduced to the tonal tier, one by one, by tonal rules. The correlative assumption of this approach is that tones are not automatically associated to tone bearing units by the Well Formedness Condition, but mapped to them only if specified by a particular association rule.
The ultimate purpose of this study is to develop a type of approach to Japanese pitch-accent systems that incorporates recent developments in the autosegmental theory of other tonal and pitch-accent languages. Based on the notions such as floating tone, extratonality, etc., this paper presents a theory of tonal rules, which aims to explain all the varieties of Japanese pitch-accent systems, whereby all predictable information is not included by underlying phonological entries, but rather is ultimately supplied by a finite number of parameters.

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It is well known that the metrical unit which is called mora plays an important role in Japanese.
The aim of this study is therefore (i) to argue that the syllable template previously proposed is inadequate to treat Japanese phonology in its right perspective, (ii) to make a new proposal on CV-skeleta and syllable template in Japanese phonology, and (iii) to show how the proposal developed here can handle phonological issues such as accent movement, vowel contraction, compensatory lengthening, etc., in a principled way.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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In Japanese language, some transitive verbs, such as kiru ‘cut’ and yogosu ‘make dirty’ are paired with morphologically and semantically corresponding intransitive ones, such as kireru ‘be parted’ and yogoreru ‘become dirty’, but others, such as tataku ‘beat’ and yomu ‘read’, are not. Is it an unpredictable matter depending on an individual transitive verb whether it is paired with an intransitive one or not? The purpose of this paper is to show that it is not and to propose that there is the semantic difference between paired and unpaired transitive verbs: in general, the former describe the event focussing on the result of an agent's action, and the latter describe the event focussing on the process of an agent's action.

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