High tone shift and spreading in endangered Japanese dialects

This paper analyses H(igh) tone shift and spreading in Koshikijima Japanese, a highly endangered language spoken in the south of Japan. It is a moraic language as opposed to a syllabic one where an H tone is placed on a certain mora by counting the number of moras from the end of the word. However, this moraic principle is often violated if the H tone is assigned by rule to the second, i.e. nonhead, mora of heavy syllables. Based on original fieldwork, this paper demonstrates that the endangered language attempts to avoid the marked prosodic structure in two independent ways: H tone shift and H tone spreading. In a way, these solutions reveal an interesting interaction between (word) tone and the two prosodic units, syllable and mora. The paper also provides principled accounts for several types of phonological asymmetries observed in the tonal phenomena.