MOTOORI Norinaga discussed two types of man'yogana used in Kojiki, in the chapter Kana no koto in his Kojikiden vol. I. HASHIMOTO Shinkichi undervalued MOTOORI's Kana no koto. But in fact, MOTOORI had discovered the distinction between two types of man'yogana, and identified the phonological background of the two types. He had a knowledge of the phonology of Ancient Chinese, and could apply Inkyo (韻鏡 Yunjing) to the distinguishing of the two types of man'yogana. MOTOORI must have taken the phonology of Ancient Chinese into consideration during his work on man'yogana in Kana no koto.

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In this paper, by specifically focusing on the word for "funeral" out of the many words related to folk rituals, the author seeks to clarify how societal factors such as the way funeral rites are conducted and the concept of "phase" (iso, 位相) relate to the formation of dialectical distribution. First, data on the dialectical variants of the word "funeral" was collected from nation-wide surveys. Then, using this data in combination with literary history, the author reconstructed the history of the word "funeral" while keeping an eye out for controversial or problematic points. By considering these points in conjunction with changes in funeral rites, the author was able to resolve areas of doubt and arrive at a conclusion, namely that the terms names "okuri," "dabi," "sorei," "soren," "tomurai," "jambon," and "soshiki" for "funeral" found in a dialectical distribution survey, developed in a way that corresponds to three stages of change in ordinary people's funeral rites, and this is reflected in the formation of the dialectical distribution itself. Moreover, it became clear that the diffusion of these terms, which transcended the bounds of "phase", is linked to dialect formation.

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The aim of this paper is to compare past and retrospective expressions in Tohoku Japanese and Korean. Both of the two languages have a complex past form -tatta (TJ)/-essess-ta (K), in addition to a simpler past form of -ta (TJ)/-ess-ta (K). Unlike the simpler type, the complex past forms have the following features: (i) they indicate that the result of an action doesn't hold at the speech time, (ii) they are interpreted that the speaker directly experienced/perceived an event, (iii) in toki/ttay 'when' clauses, they don't represent the resultant situation beyond a delimited point, and (iv) they are often used in counter-factual conditionals. I attribute these features to the fact that these forms are originated from -te atta/-e iss-ess-ta, respectively, both of which have the form of "the conjunctive form + the past form of the existential verb", both of which mark the durative past, and inherited the contextual meanings of the older forms. -essess-ta and -tatta differ in the following respects: (v) the former retains older usages than the latter: it indicates 'durative past', 'past perfect' and 'detection', and isn't used with the existential verb, and (vi) it is difficult to use -tatta in adjectival and nominal predicates. I explain the property (vi) as being attributable to the fact that -ke is used in those contexts. The retrospective forms -ke (TJ)/-te- (K) share the features of (i) and (ii) above. However, they differ from -tatta/-essess-ta in that they don't mark the experience of the speaker's own action, and contextually represent the 'past' and 'duration' on the basis of the past perception of the event, while -tatta/-essess-ta represent the evidential meaning contextually derived from the durative past. I claim that the reason why the two languages have both -tatta/-essess-ta and -ke/-te- is due to the fact that -ta/-ess-ta may indicate the present, and that the two languages have developed a means to clearly distinguish the past from the present.

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This research studied Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Japanese word-initial voiced stops, with the purpose of finding patterns of geographical variation. Although it is generally believed that Japanese voiced stops basically take negative values, my previous studies (Takada 2006, 2007a, 2007b) show that there are (1) regional differences, (2) generational differences, and (3) no co-occurrence of nasalization and voicing in the case of medial stops. The entire picture of the VOT's geographical pattern, however, is yet unknown. Data for the acoustic study include a speech corpus that was collected throughout Japan in the years 1986-1988, and recent recordings, made in the years 2006-2007, that additionally include some yet unresearched areas. In total, about 450 speakers pronounced 15 words with an initial voiced stop. VOT was analyzed with the help of a waveform and spectrogram. General results suggest a clear geographical pattern as follows. Older generation speakers show an East-West regional opposition, one of the most common patterns in Japanese dialectology. Namely, VOT values for Tohoku (East regional variety) evenly match positive values, whereas on the other hand, Kanto and areas west (West regional variety) are unified by negative VOT values. The latter variety is suggested as having a peripheral distribution, of which the Kinki area is thought to be most typical. These regional differences, however, are found to be unclear in younger generations. The reason for this is thought to be changes in the West regional variety, wherein VOT values are getting larger, and gradually turning into positive ones.

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[in Japanese]

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