Kattobase: The linguistic structure of Japanese baseball chants

Abstract

Japanese baseball chants, an obligatory and quasi-ritual part of virtually every baseball game, are delivered by fans each time their team is at bat. They are accompanied by a variety of musical instruments (drums, trumpets, etc.). They consist of two measures of four beats, each composed of three notes plus one pause. At issue is the form of the rhythmic adaptation, which is tightly regulated and grounded, as we show, in the rhythmic structure of the language itself. An OT analysis, with ranked and violable constraints, succeededs in folding what otherwise appears to be a set of separate rules depending on the length of the input into a single unified constraint system with a single ranking, where the length of the input exerts its influence by resulting in different violation profiles in outputs, and does not require separate rules for inputs of different length.