Japanese Phonology by Tsutomu Akamatsu

What crucially distinguishes this book from any others previously published on Japanese phonology is that the approach adopted in this book is functionalist. The author offers his own phonological analysis of current standard Japanese (of which he is a native speaker) from a functional point of view. The objective of the present book is therefore to present an analysis of the phonic substance (of both segmental and suprasegmental nature) of Japanese with a view to identifying and hierarchically classifying the functions that they fulfil in the phonic substance of the language and making statements about the actual workings of these functions in Japanese.