Ragyō-godanka is a phenomenon in various Japanese dialects, in which a vowel-final verb stem behaves morphologically the same as a consonant-final verb stem ending in /r/ (e.g., miran /mir-an/ ‘do not see’; Shība Village dialect, Miyazaki Prefecture). This paper describes the dialectal variation of the verb stem and suffix conditions under which ragyō-godanka occurs and then formulates these variations as implicational hierarchies with regard to stem-final vowels, stem mora counts, and suffixes. Finally, it elucidates the motivation for the value ordering of these hierarchies as reflecting the frequencies of word forms.

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Commencing in the sixteenth century, texts in romanized Japanese by the Jesuits present us with the earliest largely consistent romanization scheme for the language. The value of such transcriptions for the study of Japanese phonetics and phonology through time is generally acknowledged. At the same time, these texts also invite us to reflect on the still vexing issue of spacing between orthographic words. What were the basic rules established by the Jesuits, how can we explain exceptions to these rules, and what are the sometimes conflicting motivations behind their approach? The remarkable change in the spacing of enclitics in the middle of the Jesuits’ Feiqe no monogatari (1592) has long captured scholarly attention. In-depth studies of the spacing behavior seen in different works began with Inoue (1968) at the latest. Studies in more recent years (e.g., Chiba 2009) have achieved considerable progress in that they not only provide detailed statistics but also consider related phenomena such as hyphenation and take a larger text corpus into account. Research to date, however, lacks transparency in that the underlying (digital) text data usually remains unpublished, making claims difficult to verify independently. Based on a quantitative analysis of the freely accessible digital text of the Contemptus mundi (1596), this paper offers an overview of its manifold approaches to providing readers with segmentation cues. The result is contrasted with the earliest extant grammatical descriptions of Japanese in the Arte da lingoa de Iapam (1604–1608) by João Rodriguez.

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This study examines the co-occurrence restrictions between Wh-words and the sentence-final use of nara and rja: ~ ja: in the Tamano variety of Okayama Japanese. Mushiaki (1958) first observed that these conditional forms appear sentence-finally only with a Wh-word. While previous research suggested that Wh-words require these forms, this study argues that the dependency is reversed: the sentence-final conditional forms necessitate a Wh-word. This paper argues that sentence-final nara derives from the realis nar-e-ba, retaining its copular function with an explanatory tone, similar to noda in Standard Japanese. Its nuance of criticism explains its preference among male speakers. In contrast, rja: ~ ja: likely originates from jara (ni ja ara mu), a conjectural copula, not a true conditional. Unlike nara, rja: behaves as a verbal inflection akin to the Standard Japanese volitional form (j)ooka, expressing a suggestion or proposal. This study provides new insights into the syntax and history of sentence-final particles. Although Miyake (2014) does not analyze this structure as kakari musubi, his analysis overlooks the direction of dependency that is crucial for its understanding.

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