UC Berkeley Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society Title Reevaluating the Diphthong Mergers in Japono-Ryukyuan Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2nc3w5b3 Journal Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 41(41) ISSN 2377-1666 Author Lau, Tyler Publication Date 2015 DOI 10.20354/B4414110023 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California PROCEEDINGS OF THE FORTY-FIRST ANNUAL MEETING OF THE BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SOCIETY February 7-8, 2015 General Session Special Session Fieldwork Methodology Editors Anna E. Jurgensen Hannah Sande Spencer Lamoureux Kenny Baclawski Alison Zerbe Berkeley Linguistics Society Berkeley, CA, USA Berkeley Linguistics Society University of California, Berkeley Department of Linguistics 1203 Dwinelle Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-2650 USA All papers copyright c 2015 by the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN: 0363-2946 LCCN: 76-640143 Contents Acknowledgments . v Foreword . vii The No Blur Principle Effects as an Emergent Property of Language Systems Farrell Ackerman, Robert Malouf . 1 Intensification and sociolinguistic variation: a corpus study Andrea Beltrama . 15 Tagalog Sluicing Revisited Lena Borise . 31 Phonological Opacity in Pendau: a Local Constraint Conjunction Analysis Yan Chen . 49 Proximal Demonstratives in Predicate NPs Ryan B . Doran, Gregory Ward . 61 Syntax of generic null objects revisited Vera Dvořák . 71 Non-canonical Noun Incorporation in Bzhedug Adyghe Ksenia Ershova . 99 Perceptual distribution of merging phonemes Valerie Freeman . 121 Second Position and “Floating” Clitics in Wakhi Zuzanna Fuchs . 133 Some causative alternations in K’iche’, and a unified syntactic derivation John Gluckman . 155 The ‘Whole’ Story of Partitive Quantification Kristen A . Greer . 175 A Field Method to Describe Spontaneous Motion Events in Japanese Miyuki Ishibashi . 197 i On the Derivation of Relative Clauses in Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec Nick Kalivoda, Erik Zyman . 219 Gradability and Mimetic Verbs in Japanese: A Frame-Semantic Account Naoki Kiyama, Kimi Akita . 245 Exhaustivity, Predication and the Semantics of Movement Peter Klecha, Martina Martinović . 267 Reevaluating the Diphthong Mergers in Japono-Ryukyuan Tyler Lau . 287 Pluractionality and the stative vs . eventive contrast in Ranmo Jenny Lee . 307 Labial Harmonic Shift in Kazakh: Mapping the Pathways and Motivations for Decay Adam G . McCollum . 329 Reference to situation content in Uyghur auxiliary ‘bolmaq’ Andrew McKenzie, Gülnar Eziz, Travis Major . 353 Case-Marking in Estonian Pseudopartitives Mark Norris . 371 Discourse Coherence and Relativization in Korean Sang-Hee Park . 397 Negotiating Lexical Uncertainty and Speaker Expertise with Disjunction Christopher Potts, Roger Levy . 417 Patterns of Misperception of Arabic Consonants Chelsea Sanker . 447 The Imperative Split and the Origin of Switch-Reference Markers in Nungon Hannah Sarvasy . 473 Asymmetries in Long-Distance QR Misako Tanaka . 493 The cross-linguistic distribution of sign language parameters Rachael Tatman . 503 ii Homophony and contrast neutralization in Southern Min tone sandhi circle Tsz-Him Tsui . 515 Cultural Transmission of Self-Concept from Parent to Child in Chinese American Families Aya Williams, Stephen Chen, Qing Zhou . 533 Fruits for Animals: Hunting Avoidance Speech Style in Murui Katarzyna Izabela Wojtylak . 545 A Quest for Linguistic Authenticity: Cantonese and Putonghua in Postcolonial Hong Kong Andrew D . Wong . 563 iii iv Acknowledgments As the Executive Committee of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Soci- ety, we would like to express our gratitude to the conference participants, volunteers, session chairs, faculty, and staff members for their participation. It was your contributions that made the conference a success. We are especially grateful for the patience, hard work, and support of Paula Floro and Bel´en Flores, without whom BLS 41 would not have been possible. We would also like to thank the following departments and organizations of the University of California, Berkeley for their generous financial support: Department of Linguistics Student Opportunity Fund Graduate Assembly Department of Philosophy Department of Psychology Department of Ethnic Studies French Department Department of Spanish and Portuguese Berkeley Language Center Office of Academic Affairs Vice President v vi Foreword This monograph contains a number of the talks given at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, held in Berkeley, California, February 7-8, 2015. The conference included a General Session and the Special Session Fieldwork Methodology. The 41st Annual Meeting was planned and run by the second-year graduate students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley: Kenny Baclawski, Anna Jurgensen, Spencer Lamoureux, Hannah Sande, and Alison Zerbe. The original submissions of the papers in this volume were reviewed for style by Anna Jur- gensen and Hannah Sande. Resubmitted papers were edited as necessary by Anna Jurgensen and Kenny Baclawski, and then compiled into the final monograph by Anna Jurgensen. The final monograph was reviewed by Spencer Lamoureux. The endeavor was supported by Ali- son Zerbe’s management of the Berkeley Linguistic Society’s funds for publications. The BLS 41 Executive Committee July 2015 vii viii Reevaluating the Diphthong Mergers in Japono-Ryukyuan Tyler Lau Harvard University∗ 1 Introduction Great strides have been made in the field of historical Japono-Ryukyuan studies in the past half century with the shift in the perception of the Ryukyuan languages as mere dialects of Japanese to cousin languages that preserve various phonological and morphological features that have been lost in the Japanese subfamily. In particular, the Ryukyuan data has both secured and contributed to reconstructions of Proto-Japono-Ryukyuan vowel system that had been previously based purely on internal reconstruction via Old Japanese and scant examples from Ryukyuan and/or dialect data. One area of the vowel system reconstruction that has been particularly advanced by Ryukyuan data is that of the Proto-Japono-Ryukyuan diphthongs, which have preserved reflexes in various ways in the different Ryukyuan languages. In this paper, I explore the re- flexes of the Proto-Japono-Ryukyuan diphthongs ending in *i in Southern Ryukyuan (hence- forth referred to as Sakishima) languages. The evidence in these languages not only provides further evidence for the diphthongs that have been proposed in the literature, but also throws into question the diphthong mergers that have been proposed for Proto-Ryukyuan. Further- more, I adduce evidence from these languages for the preservation of the proto-diphthongs not only after labial and velar stops, as the Old Japanese data has suggested, but also after coronal obstruents. I first provide a background of the Ryukyuan languages in 2, followed by a brief discus- sion of the work that has been done in the reconstruction of§ the Proto-Japono-Ryukyuan diphthongs in 3. 4 introduces the data from Sakishima languages and discusses the im- plications for reconstruction.§ § Finally, 5 concludes.1 § ∗Special thanks to my Taketomi informants: Setsu Furugen and Teruo Irisato and to my Shiraho in- formants: Toyo Shiroma, Kiyoshi Tau, Yone Tau, Hiroshi Tooji, and Yuusei Miyara. Thanks as well to Christopher Davis, Natsuko Nakagawa, and Akiko Mizuno for sharing data and to the audience at the Polinsky Language Sciences Lab for providing helpful comments. 1The following orthography is used in place of IPA: c = [tC],sj=[C],zj=[dý], f = [F] , ¨ı = [ 1]. In Yonaguni, apostrophes are used to represent a fortis consonant. In all Japono-Ryukyuan languages, s and z are palatalized before i and coda n is a placeless or uvular nasal (generally represented in Japanese phonology as ð), so si and zi uniformly represent phonetic [Ci] and [ýi], respectively, and n will be assumed to represent phonetic [ð] in coda position. The abbreviations are as follows: ModJ = Modern Japanese, NR = Northern Ryukyuan, PJR = Proto-Japono-Ryukyuan, PR = Proto-Ryukyuan, SR = Southern Ryukyuan/Sakishima, WOJ = Western Old Japanese. 287 Tyler Lau 2 The Ryukyuan Languages The Ryukyuan languages may be divided into five or six dialect continua, depending upon the classification (Serafim 2008:80). One such classification, provided by (Pellard 2015:15) is given in Figure 1. Those considering Kunigami to be a separate language group from Amami and Okinawa would place Kunigami as a sister branch to them under Northern Ryukyuan. Figure 1: The Japono-Ryukyuan Language Family Proto-Japono-Ryukyuan Ryukyuan Japanese Hachij¯o Southern Ryukyuan Northern Ryukyuan Amami Okinawa Macro-Yaeyama Miyako Yaeyama Yonaguni2 These languages are spoken in the Ryukyuan islands, which comprise the entire modern day Okinawa Prefecture and the southern Amami islands of Kagoshima Prefecture, all of which stretch for about 900 kilometers south of Kyushu, the southernmost island of the Japanese mainland. The Proto-Ryukyuan language likely developed during the first centuries of the common era, coinciding with the migration of the Ryukyuans into the Ryukyuan islands (Pellard 2015:30). The languages subsequently spread throughout the Ryukyuan islands and were spoken ubiquitously into the unification of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1406 and until the dissolution of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879, at which point Japanese imperialism led to