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An Introduction to Japanese Phonology*
Journal of Phonetics (1987) 15, 389-392
An Introduction to Japanese Phonology* By Timothy J. Vance New York: State University of New York Press, 1987 Mary Beckman Departmen t of Linguistics, Ohio State University, 204 Cunz Hall, 1841 Millikin Road, Columbus, OH 43210 , U.S.A.
In the preface to this book, the author describes it as an "attempt to provide a broad survey of important topics and interesting issues" to serve as a phonology text in "a course on the structure of Japanese for linguistics students" (p. xi). There is an obvious need for such an introductory text, and it is not just among students in Japanese linguistics courses. Standard Japanese presents several phenomena of general interest that guarantee a wider audience for this book. For example, the perennial citation of the Japanese "mora" in the phonetics literature on timing (e.g. Port eta!., 1980; Hoequist, 1983) ensures that there will be more than a parochial interest in Chapter 5 ("Mora Consonants") and Chapter 6 ("Syllables and Moras") . Moreover, the Standard Japanese sound system has now been studied enough to warrant its inclusion among languages that must be considered whenever a phonetician tests the cross-language generality of an hypothesis. A book that introduces the non-controversial facts about Standard Japanese phonology and summarizes the major points of view on controversial matters would, therefore, be an invaluable reference work . Of course, an introductory textbook will be limited in value as a reference work if it does not cover a broad range of the phenomena likely to be of interest. Vance anticipates disappointment on this score, saying "I am certain that no one will be entirely satisfied with my choice of topics" (p. xi). His fear is unfounded. His choice of topics is comprehensive. In addition to the discussion of syllables and moras, the book includes chapters on "Vowel Devoicing" and on "Accent", two other topics that have figured often in the work of phoneticians and theoretical phonologists. Other topics of potential interest to phoneticians are covered in chapters on " Articulatory Settings", "Vowels", (non-moraic) "Consonants", and "The Velar Nasal" (a topic which deserves this chapter on its own because the alternation between syllable-initial [IJ] and [g] in Standard Japanese is complicated by sociolinguistic and prosodic factors) . The final three chapters deal with various morphological patterns that are of more immediate interest to phonologists or historical linguists than to phoneticians, and there is no separate chapter on intonation and phrasing. But the latter omission reflects the state of the field at the time that Vance was writing, and was a well-considered choice on his part. Thus, this book is well worth acquiring as an introduction to Japanese phonology, and it would be invaluable as a comprehensive reference work if the topics chosen were covered in appropriate detail. For a reference work, however, there are two ways in which the coverage of a topic can be inappropriate: too much space can be given to theoretical questions that hold no current interest to phonologists, and not enough space can *Price: paper $19.50; cloth $44.50.
390
Book reviews
be given to phonetic detail. Unfortunately, the value of An Introduction to Japanese Phonology is diminished because the coverage of most topics is inadequate in either or both of these ways. A typical example is the section on long vowels (Section 3.2). This is an important topic because the potential distinction between long vowels and two short vowels belonging to different morphemes is directly relevant to the description of possible phonological units above the mora. It is, therefore, worthwhile to use the space that Vance does in discussing such classic contrasts as Kindaichi's satoo-ya " sugar shop" versus sato-oya "foster parent" and Kawakami's rnaa " well" versus rna a- (in lku rna aru " Is there time to go?''). On the other hand , Vance devotes nearly all these pages to the question of whether the long vowels should be " phonemicized" as single vowels with an added "length phoneme" or as linear sequences of like vowels. These were the only phonological representations available in the days of the American structuralists, and the choice between them was controversial because it was intimately linked to the question of whether phonological analysis should refer to "grammatical units" such as words . However, these are no longer the only representations available, linguists having long since abandoned the notion that phoneme-sized segments are the only unit of phonological organization . Given the vintage of the debate between these two possible phonemicizations of long vowels, it is perhaps not surprising that the only phonetic cue that Vance discusses here is the possibility of a junctura! "vowel rearticulation" , which he defines, following Bloch (1950), as " a diminution of loudness between the two vowels . . . and a renewed pulse of expiration on the second". In Bloch's day, this " renewed pulse of expiration" meant something like Stetson's "chest pulse". Later, in the chapter on syllables and moras, Vance is careful to dissociate his definition of the syllable in Japanese from Stetson's now refuted theory, but in this earlier section on long vowels he proposes no alternative definition of vowel rearticulation. It would be useful to have at least a list of possible phonetic cues that might be subsumed under such a term. For example, in slow or careful speech, strong palatal and labial glides can separate the vowels across the word- medial morpheme boundaries in words such as i-inkai "committee" and ba-ai "circumstance". If Vance had reviewed the experimental literature on formant transitions and coarticulation, he might have found further segmental cues. Also , it would have been appropriate here to consider possible suprasegmental cues, especially those that define organizational units larger than the syllable. Vance does suggest that Kawakami 's Iku rna aru is different from sato-oya because of the "major syntactic division" separating the rna from the aru. But he fails to mention that the syntactic boundary would almost necessarily result in at least an accentual phrase boundary in actual speech, and he thus makes no qualitative distinction between minor word- medial junctures and major phonological phrase boundaries, where the tonal pattern is surely more important than any subtle manifestation of "vowel rearticulation". While recent experimental literature detailing the phonetic characteristics of the accentual phrase boundary (e.g. Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986a,b) would not have been available to Vance when he wrote this section, the notion of the accentual phrase is of long standing (e.g. Hattori, 1961), and it is an unfortunate oversight not to have considered the possibility of suprasegmental cues in this case. The inordinate attention paid to antiquated questions ofphonemicization is a problem throughout the chapters on segmental phonology. Large parts of the chapter on nonmoraic consonants and over half of the chapter on moraic consonants are taken up on such debates as whether the affricates [ts] and [tJ] belong to the phoneme j t j .
Book reviews
391
None of this discussion presents any new data. Vance might have looked at the growing literature on speech errors (e.g. Tabusa, 1982), or, better yet, he might have done psychological experiments to get evidence for how native speakers categorize these sounds. Instead, however, he relies completely on lists of superficial distributional patterns augmented by occasional anecdotal observations of finer details of usage and stylistic register. The chapter on vowel devoicing is especially disappointing in regard to the lack of attention given to current experimental research . Three pages are given to Bloch's treatment of the phenomenon, a historical curiosity that merits no more than a footnote . Bloch claimed that in the case of fricatives and affricates , the phenomenon actually involves consonant clusters, a claim that Vance could have dismissed easily by pointing out that the syllable count is the same as in the case of stops and is no different from when the vowel is not devoiced . Instead Vance repeats Han's (1962) argument that devoiced vowels must be spectrally distinguishable from neighbouring voiceless fricatives because vowels can be heard in whispered speech, and cites her claim that even when the vowel is spectrally merged with the preceding consonant, the syllable retains its original duration. But the argument from whispered vowels is not valid because we have known for more than a decade that devoiced vowels are not whispered (Weitzman et al. , 1976), and the argument from segment durations is dubious because Han's observations were of a few utterances in which the apparent compensatory adjustment in the devoiced syllable duration is probably phrase-final lengthening [cf. the discussion and duration measurements in Beckman (1982)]. The chapter also fails to mention the more interesting phonological issues raised by the fact that the fricative is coarticulated with the following vowel even in syllables where the vowel has seemingly been deleted (Beckman & Shoji, 1984) and by the fact that vowel devoicing differs from more automatic allophony such as the aerodynamic voicing of intervocalic /h/ (Yoshioka, 1981 ). The chapter on accent is also quite outdated, reporting none of the more recent experimental data that show how accent patterns interact within larger intonational structures and which suggest a radically new representation of accent in Japanese (Poser 1984; Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986a,b). However, this literature is more recent than the experimental literature that Vance fails to report in the chapters on segmental phonology, and it is likely that it was not available to Vance at the time that he was writing this book. The chapter on verb morphology, on the other hand, is quite good , and reports an interesting experiment in which Vance attempts to determine the psychological reality of various phonological rules that have been posited in describing the regular forms of verb inflection paradigms. There is much in this book to disappoint anyone familiar with the phonological and phonetic literature on the language. Or rather, there is much missing from this book , the omission of which will disappoint. On the other hand , while the book could have been much better than it is, the general topics it introduces constitute a complete list of those that an introductory work should cover. While the omission of much important experimental literature detracts seriously from the value of the book, it is still the only reasonably complete reference work available to researchers who cannot read Japanese.
References Beckman, M. E. (1982) Segment duration and the "mora" in Japanese, Phonelica, 39, I 13- 135. Beckman, M. E. & Pierrehumbert, J. B. (1986a) Japanese prosodic phrasing and intonation synthesis. In Proceedings of !he 24lh Annual Meeling of the Association for Compulational Lingustics, 173- 180.
392
Book reviews
Beckman, M. E. & Pierrehumbert, J . B. ( l986b) Intonational structure in Engl ish and Japanese, Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255- 309. Beckman, M. E. & Shoji, A. (1984) Perceptual evidence for CV coarticulation in devoiced /si/ and /syu/ in Japanese, Phonetica, 41, 61 - 71. Bloch, B. (194 1) Studies in coll oq ui al Japanese. IV. Phonemics, Language, 26, 86-125. Han, M. S. (1962) Unvoicing of vowels in Japanese, Onsei no kenkyuu, 10, 8 1- 100. Hattori, S. (1961) Prosodeme, syllable structure, and laryngeal phonemes, Bulletin of the Summer Institute in Linguistics, ICU, 1. (Reprinted in Shibata , T. eta/. (eds) Linguistics in Japan , Vol. 2, Phonology, Tokyo: Taishukan.) Hoequist, C. (1983) Durational correlates of li nguistic rhythm categories, Phonetica, 40, 19- 31. Port , R. , Al-Ani, S. & Maeda, S. ( 1980) Temporal compensation and universal phonetics, Phonetica, 37, 235- 252. Poser, W. J. (1984) The phonetics and phonology of tone and intonation in Japanese. Unpublished Ph.D. di ssertation , MIT. Ta busa, T. (1982) Kotoba no totiri. Yonago: Imai-shoten. Weitzman, R. S. , Sawashima, M. , Hirose, H . & Ushijima, T. (1976) Devoiced and whispered vowels in Japanese, Annual Bulletin of the Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, University of Tokyo, 10, 61- 79. Yoshioka, H. (198 1) Laryngeal adjustments in the production of fricative consonants and devoiced vowels in Japanese, Phonetica, 38, 236-25 1.
An Introduction to Japanese Phonology* By Timothy J. Vance New York: State University of New York Press, 1987 Mary Beckman Departmen t of Linguistics, Ohio State University, 204 Cunz Hall, 1841 Millikin Road, Columbus, OH 43210 , U.S.A.
In the preface to this book, the author describes it as an "attempt to provide a broad survey of important topics and interesting issues" to serve as a phonology text in "a course on the structure of Japanese for linguistics students" (p. xi). There is an obvious need for such an introductory text, and it is not just among students in Japanese linguistics courses. Standard Japanese presents several phenomena of general interest that guarantee a wider audience for this book. For example, the perennial citation of the Japanese "mora" in the phonetics literature on timing (e.g. Port eta!., 1980; Hoequist, 1983) ensures that there will be more than a parochial interest in Chapter 5 ("Mora Consonants") and Chapter 6 ("Syllables and Moras") . Moreover, the Standard Japanese sound system has now been studied enough to warrant its inclusion among languages that must be considered whenever a phonetician tests the cross-language generality of an hypothesis. A book that introduces the non-controversial facts about Standard Japanese phonology and summarizes the major points of view on controversial matters would, therefore, be an invaluable reference work . Of course, an introductory textbook will be limited in value as a reference work if it does not cover a broad range of the phenomena likely to be of interest. Vance anticipates disappointment on this score, saying "I am certain that no one will be entirely satisfied with my choice of topics" (p. xi). His fear is unfounded. His choice of topics is comprehensive. In addition to the discussion of syllables and moras, the book includes chapters on "Vowel Devoicing" and on "Accent", two other topics that have figured often in the work of phoneticians and theoretical phonologists. Other topics of potential interest to phoneticians are covered in chapters on " Articulatory Settings", "Vowels", (non-moraic) "Consonants", and "The Velar Nasal" (a topic which deserves this chapter on its own because the alternation between syllable-initial [IJ] and [g] in Standard Japanese is complicated by sociolinguistic and prosodic factors) . The final three chapters deal with various morphological patterns that are of more immediate interest to phonologists or historical linguists than to phoneticians, and there is no separate chapter on intonation and phrasing. But the latter omission reflects the state of the field at the time that Vance was writing, and was a well-considered choice on his part. Thus, this book is well worth acquiring as an introduction to Japanese phonology, and it would be invaluable as a comprehensive reference work if the topics chosen were covered in appropriate detail. For a reference work, however, there are two ways in which the coverage of a topic can be inappropriate: too much space can be given to theoretical questions that hold no current interest to phonologists, and not enough space can *Price: paper $19.50; cloth $44.50.
390
Book reviews
be given to phonetic detail. Unfortunately, the value of An Introduction to Japanese Phonology is diminished because the coverage of most topics is inadequate in either or both of these ways. A typical example is the section on long vowels (Section 3.2). This is an important topic because the potential distinction between long vowels and two short vowels belonging to different morphemes is directly relevant to the description of possible phonological units above the mora. It is, therefore, worthwhile to use the space that Vance does in discussing such classic contrasts as Kindaichi's satoo-ya " sugar shop" versus sato-oya "foster parent" and Kawakami's rnaa " well" versus rna a- (in lku rna aru " Is there time to go?''). On the other hand , Vance devotes nearly all these pages to the question of whether the long vowels should be " phonemicized" as single vowels with an added "length phoneme" or as linear sequences of like vowels. These were the only phonological representations available in the days of the American structuralists, and the choice between them was controversial because it was intimately linked to the question of whether phonological analysis should refer to "grammatical units" such as words . However, these are no longer the only representations available, linguists having long since abandoned the notion that phoneme-sized segments are the only unit of phonological organization . Given the vintage of the debate between these two possible phonemicizations of long vowels, it is perhaps not surprising that the only phonetic cue that Vance discusses here is the possibility of a junctura! "vowel rearticulation" , which he defines, following Bloch (1950), as " a diminution of loudness between the two vowels . . . and a renewed pulse of expiration on the second". In Bloch's day, this " renewed pulse of expiration" meant something like Stetson's "chest pulse". Later, in the chapter on syllables and moras, Vance is careful to dissociate his definition of the syllable in Japanese from Stetson's now refuted theory, but in this earlier section on long vowels he proposes no alternative definition of vowel rearticulation. It would be useful to have at least a list of possible phonetic cues that might be subsumed under such a term. For example, in slow or careful speech, strong palatal and labial glides can separate the vowels across the word- medial morpheme boundaries in words such as i-inkai "committee" and ba-ai "circumstance". If Vance had reviewed the experimental literature on formant transitions and coarticulation, he might have found further segmental cues. Also , it would have been appropriate here to consider possible suprasegmental cues, especially those that define organizational units larger than the syllable. Vance does suggest that Kawakami 's Iku rna aru is different from sato-oya because of the "major syntactic division" separating the rna from the aru. But he fails to mention that the syntactic boundary would almost necessarily result in at least an accentual phrase boundary in actual speech, and he thus makes no qualitative distinction between minor word- medial junctures and major phonological phrase boundaries, where the tonal pattern is surely more important than any subtle manifestation of "vowel rearticulation". While recent experimental literature detailing the phonetic characteristics of the accentual phrase boundary (e.g. Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986a,b) would not have been available to Vance when he wrote this section, the notion of the accentual phrase is of long standing (e.g. Hattori, 1961), and it is an unfortunate oversight not to have considered the possibility of suprasegmental cues in this case. The inordinate attention paid to antiquated questions ofphonemicization is a problem throughout the chapters on segmental phonology. Large parts of the chapter on nonmoraic consonants and over half of the chapter on moraic consonants are taken up on such debates as whether the affricates [ts] and [tJ] belong to the phoneme j t j .
Book reviews
391
None of this discussion presents any new data. Vance might have looked at the growing literature on speech errors (e.g. Tabusa, 1982), or, better yet, he might have done psychological experiments to get evidence for how native speakers categorize these sounds. Instead, however, he relies completely on lists of superficial distributional patterns augmented by occasional anecdotal observations of finer details of usage and stylistic register. The chapter on vowel devoicing is especially disappointing in regard to the lack of attention given to current experimental research . Three pages are given to Bloch's treatment of the phenomenon, a historical curiosity that merits no more than a footnote . Bloch claimed that in the case of fricatives and affricates , the phenomenon actually involves consonant clusters, a claim that Vance could have dismissed easily by pointing out that the syllable count is the same as in the case of stops and is no different from when the vowel is not devoiced . Instead Vance repeats Han's (1962) argument that devoiced vowels must be spectrally distinguishable from neighbouring voiceless fricatives because vowels can be heard in whispered speech, and cites her claim that even when the vowel is spectrally merged with the preceding consonant, the syllable retains its original duration. But the argument from whispered vowels is not valid because we have known for more than a decade that devoiced vowels are not whispered (Weitzman et al. , 1976), and the argument from segment durations is dubious because Han's observations were of a few utterances in which the apparent compensatory adjustment in the devoiced syllable duration is probably phrase-final lengthening [cf. the discussion and duration measurements in Beckman (1982)]. The chapter also fails to mention the more interesting phonological issues raised by the fact that the fricative is coarticulated with the following vowel even in syllables where the vowel has seemingly been deleted (Beckman & Shoji, 1984) and by the fact that vowel devoicing differs from more automatic allophony such as the aerodynamic voicing of intervocalic /h/ (Yoshioka, 1981 ). The chapter on accent is also quite outdated, reporting none of the more recent experimental data that show how accent patterns interact within larger intonational structures and which suggest a radically new representation of accent in Japanese (Poser 1984; Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986a,b). However, this literature is more recent than the experimental literature that Vance fails to report in the chapters on segmental phonology, and it is likely that it was not available to Vance at the time that he was writing this book. The chapter on verb morphology, on the other hand, is quite good , and reports an interesting experiment in which Vance attempts to determine the psychological reality of various phonological rules that have been posited in describing the regular forms of verb inflection paradigms. There is much in this book to disappoint anyone familiar with the phonological and phonetic literature on the language. Or rather, there is much missing from this book , the omission of which will disappoint. On the other hand , while the book could have been much better than it is, the general topics it introduces constitute a complete list of those that an introductory work should cover. While the omission of much important experimental literature detracts seriously from the value of the book, it is still the only reasonably complete reference work available to researchers who cannot read Japanese.
References Beckman, M. E. (1982) Segment duration and the "mora" in Japanese, Phonelica, 39, I 13- 135. Beckman, M. E. & Pierrehumbert, J. B. (1986a) Japanese prosodic phrasing and intonation synthesis. In Proceedings of !he 24lh Annual Meeling of the Association for Compulational Lingustics, 173- 180.
392
Book reviews
Beckman, M. E. & Pierrehumbert, J . B. ( l986b) Intonational structure in Engl ish and Japanese, Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255- 309. Beckman, M. E. & Shoji, A. (1984) Perceptual evidence for CV coarticulation in devoiced /si/ and /syu/ in Japanese, Phonetica, 41, 61 - 71. Bloch, B. (194 1) Studies in coll oq ui al Japanese. IV. Phonemics, Language, 26, 86-125. Han, M. S. (1962) Unvoicing of vowels in Japanese, Onsei no kenkyuu, 10, 8 1- 100. Hattori, S. (1961) Prosodeme, syllable structure, and laryngeal phonemes, Bulletin of the Summer Institute in Linguistics, ICU, 1. (Reprinted in Shibata , T. eta/. (eds) Linguistics in Japan , Vol. 2, Phonology, Tokyo: Taishukan.) Hoequist, C. (1983) Durational correlates of li nguistic rhythm categories, Phonetica, 40, 19- 31. Port , R. , Al-Ani, S. & Maeda, S. ( 1980) Temporal compensation and universal phonetics, Phonetica, 37, 235- 252. Poser, W. J. (1984) The phonetics and phonology of tone and intonation in Japanese. Unpublished Ph.D. di ssertation , MIT. Ta busa, T. (1982) Kotoba no totiri. Yonago: Imai-shoten. Weitzman, R. S. , Sawashima, M. , Hirose, H . & Ushijima, T. (1976) Devoiced and whispered vowels in Japanese, Annual Bulletin of the Research Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, University of Tokyo, 10, 61- 79. Yoshioka, H. (198 1) Laryngeal adjustments in the production of fricative consonants and devoiced vowels in Japanese, Phonetica, 38, 236-25 1.