• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.93-107
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• 1999

This study deals with a general review of $Gar\acute{i}funa$ and Patois, creole languages which developed out of the sociohistorical situation of the last centuries and are mainly spoken in the West Indies and Carribean Coasts. In this paper, I present some notes and ideas on the linguistic developments and features of these languages. Especially I describe their function connected with a variety of social circumstances and their phonetical/phonological changes from the base languages. This is a result of fieldwork conducted in Honduras, Belize, Cuba and Mexico, from January 1996 to February 1998, using some surveys and collecting words from different materials and texts. And I hope this paper will contribute to research in 'mixed' languages as well as to historical linguists. I am very grateful to Mr. Mauricio $Tom\acute{a}s$, the only uriversity student in $Traves\acute{i}a$, a small town in nothern Honduras and to Mr. Carlos Marcos, a medical student who is from a Haitian family in Santiago de Cuba. Without their cooperation, I couldn't have conducted this research.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.229-241
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• 2001

Using eighteen texts from various genera of present-day Japanese, I collected phonologically reduced forms frequently observed in conversational Japanese, and classified them in search of a unified. explanation of phonological phenomena. I found 7,516 cases of reduced forms which I divided into 43 categories according to the types of phonological changes they have undergone. The general tendencies are that deletion and fusion of a phoneme or an entire syllable takes place frequently, resulting in the decrease in the number of syllables. From a morphosyntactic point of view, phonological reduction often occurs at the NP and VP morpheme boundaries. The following findings are drawn from phonetical observations of reduction. (1) Vowels are more easily deleted than consonants. (2) Bilabials ([m], [b], and [w]) are the most likely candidates for deletion. (3) In a concatenation of vowels, closed vowels are absorbed into open vowels, or two adjacent vowels come to create another vowel, in which case reconstruction of the original sequence is not always predictable. (4) Alveolars are palatalized under the influence of front vowels. (5) Regressive assimilation takes place in a syllable starting with [r], changing the entire syllable into a phonological choked sound or a syllabic nasal, depending on the voicing of the following phoneme.