This paper first illustrates suprasegmentals of Tokyo, Okayama City and Kochi City dialects, and points out that Kochi City's “high- or low-register” as intonations have functions similar to those of Tokyo and Okayama City's “phrase initial pitch rising (PIPR for short) ”. Then, this paper cites a preceding study which shows that PIPR occurs very easily in environments such as parallelism and focus markers (such as “sae, mo, nara, wa”), and lastly, to verify and enforce this hyphothesis, demonstrates the result of research on intonations of 92 informants from those areas.

Dzongkha is the national language of Bhutan, but its phonetic nature has not been studied instrumentally in depth. This research note thus explores the phonetic structure of this language, focusing on its three aspects: (i) the vowel quality, (ii) the tonal contrast, and (iii) the four-way laryngeal contrast. The results show (i) that the first three formants are necessary to distinguish the eight vowels of this language, (ii) that the tonal contrast most clearly manifests itself at the onset of syllables, and (iii) that the laryngeal contrast is acoustically differentiated in terms of both VOT and F0 of the following vowels. Although the current analysis is limited in that it is based on the data from a single speaker, it is hoped that it provides a stepping stone toward further analyses of Dzongkha, and comparative phonetic studies of other related languages.

Weakening of stop articulation in Japanese voiced plosives was analyzed using the phonetically annotated part of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ). It turned out that the weakening of /b/ and /d/ into [β] and [ð] could be best described as a function of TACA (time allocated for consonant articulation) as was the case in the affricate-fricative variation of Japanese /z/. The location of the voiced plosive phonemes in a linguistic unit showed secondary importance as a factor in the variation, but it was the location in a higher-level unit like accentual phrase or utterance that played a crucial role. The weakening of /g/ into [ɣ] or [ŋ], on the other hand, is somewhat different in that it should be treated differently depending on whether the phoneme was immediately preceded by a moraic nasal /N/. When it was preceded by an /N/, the TACA-RSA (rate of stop articulation) reached a plateau much earlier (at around 70%) than in /b/, /d/, and /g/ not preceded by an /N/ (where RSA values reached the level of 90%). It also turned out that the curve of the TACA-RSA relationship changed systematically reflecting the complexity of phonological contrast at the point of articulation of the phoneme in question. The more complex the contrast is, the earlier the curve reaches a plateau. Statistical modeling by means of logistic regression analysis revealed it was possible to predict the variation with 68–76% accuracy (closed data) using only the TACA information. The accuracy reached 72–81% when TACA and all other linguistic and extra-linguistic variables were used.

Penultimate Non-Lexical Prominence, or PNLP, is a variant of phrase final rising-falling intonation in Standard (Tokyo) Japanese. In the first half of the paper, phonetic difference between the authentic rising-falling intonation and PNLP was examined using the phonetic data of the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ). In the last half, PNLP's linguistic function was analyzed using CSJ's monologue speech and clause boundary labels that provide information about the relative strengths of various clause boundaries. Analysis of the distribution of PNLP with reference to clause boundaries revealed two interesting functions. Firstly, PNLP seemed to have culminative function; it occurred, typically, only once in an utterance bounded by absolute (i.e., the strongest) clause boundaries. Secondly, modest delimitative function was also observed; PNLP occurred, most frequently, but not regularly, in the penultimate accentual phrase of an utterance thereby predicting the end of an utterance. These findings and pilot text analysis suggested tentative conclusion that native speakers of Japanese used PNLP to predict the end of an utterance and a change in topic at the utterance boundary.

The Ikema dialect of Miyako, Southern Ryukyuan, has a three-pattern accent system in which three tone classes (Types A, B, and C) are lexically contrastive, although the Type A nouns are fewer. The biased distribution of tone classes is a consequence of a diachronic change whereby Types A and B merged together. This study aims to confirm that the original three-pattern system in Ikema retains the proto-Ryukyuan system and to demonstrate that a set of words that are originally of Type A and share specific meanings are not merged into Type B.