Japanese Teeny-Bopper Language: Prosodic Morphology and Other Linguistic Aspects
Shinsuke Watanabe
MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Geoffrey NathanJapanese Teeny-Bopper Language (JTBL) is a new group-specific language in Japanese which was recently produced by junior high, high school, and college female students in the Tokyo area and became popular among young people in Japan. Even though the language almost disappeared after a few years, the unique formations of the words in JTBL deserve a linguistic analysis. The forms involve certain morphological operations such as truncation, abbreviation, and compounding. Unlike most of the sub-languages in Japan where nouns and compounds are the target words of the morphological operations, the forms of particular verbs and adjectives as well as nouns and compounds are systematically modified in JTBL.
Words in new languages have drawn many researchers' attention to the grammar of the structures. Previous studies of word structures in various sub-languages illustrated the integration of prosodic components with the morphological operations. The formation of modified words were characterized by an invariant morphological frame called a template and the number of certain prosodic components, i.e. quantity. In the studies of various Japanese sub-languages, researchers argued that the role of bimoraic feet as a template is essential to word formations. The new theory called Optimality Theory made it possible to integrate constraints both in phonology and morphology.
In Japanese, many researchers briefly noted the influence of kana orthography in the process of word formations. Most researchers ignored accent patterns which often contribute to the recognition of the class of words in Japanese. Thus, the phonology-morphology interaction dominates and often discounts such other linguistic aspects in the analyses of new words. This thesis examines the phonology-morphology interaction and the other linguistic aspects with the word formation of the JTBL verbs and adjectives. It is proposed that the linguistic aspects thought to be non-dominant also play a significant role and that they are responsible for the production of meaningful words, i.e. the quality of the new words.
Master of Arts degree in Applied Linguistics, presented on April 16, 1999, at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
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