Syllabemes in the Dialect of Niigata City

In this paper, an attempt will be made to examine the phonological classification of a Japanese dialect, and to search for the existence of the syllabeme phenomenon in the Niigata City dialect. There are Japanese dialects which cannot analyze words such as Chu-sha and Macchi as two part units. In those dialects, long vowel(R), skipping-wise intonation(N), double consonant(Q) and the diphthong (ai, ui, and oi, etc.) are not taken as one unit of length. From this fact, Shibata (1962) assumed that there are dialects that have a different unit of the rhythm in a Japanese dialect, and classified it by the name of mora dialect/syllabeme dialect. According to Shibata (1962), Tohoku, Hokuriku, Miyazaki, Kagoshima and Nantou are syllabeme dialect regions. Others are mora dialects. If all Japanese dialects are required to belong to one of the two categories, then an interesting question arises: Is the Niigata dialect a mora dialect or syllabeme dialect? Although no one ever mentioned the problem directly, the Niigata dialect has been indirectly suggested to be a syllabeme dialect in previous work. In order to verify the existence and search for the features of the syallabeme in the Niigata dialect, Niigata City dialects were investigated. As a result, a certain syllabeme was confirmed. It is chiefly limited to the long vowel, and N, Q, and the diphthong appear as a mora. On the diphthong, it appears as syllabeme in shape of not causing the compensatory lengthening with the vowel unit