In Japanese loanwords, voiced geminates can be devoiced in the presence of another voiced obstruent (e.g., /doggu/ → /dokku/ ‘dog’). This devoicing pattern has been studied extensively in the recent phonological literature in terms of theoretical modeling as well as from the perspective of experimentation and corpus studies. Less well-known is the observation that /p/ may cause devoicing of geminates as well (e.g., /piramiddo/ → /piramitto/ ‘pyramid’), although to date no objective evidence has been offered to confirm this observation. The current study thus attempts to test this observation objectively by way of a corpus study and two phonological judgment experiments. The results generally support the idea that /p/ can cause devoicing of geminates in Japanese loanwords; in other words, /p/ may trigger Lyman’s Law in causing devoicing of geminates. In addition to this descriptive discovery, throughout the paper we discuss intriguing task effects in phonological experimentation, by comparing the corpus data and the results of the two judgment experiments. Although our aim is primarily descriptive, we offer some analytical possibilities for the /p/-driven devoicing of geminates at the end of the paper.
This paper presents a statistical model to predict Japanese word order in the double object constructions. We employed a Bayesian linear mixed model with manually annotated predicate-argument structure data. The findings from the refined corpus analysis confirmed the effects of information status of an NP as 'givennew ordering' in addition to the effects of 'long-before-short' as a tendency of the general Japanese word order.
<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'NimbusRomNo9L';">One important observation that is made in the past phonological research is that constraints on output structures can both block and trigger phonological processes (i.e., conspiracy: Kisseberth 1970). This paper reports an experiment which shows that an Identity Avoidance constraint (a.k.a. the OCP) both blocks and triggers one phonological process in the same language, namely rendaku in Japanese. Our wug- experiment shows that rendaku is more likely to apply when the two CV moras across a morpheme boundary are identical; i.e. an Identity Avoidance constraint triggers rendaku. The experiment also shows that rendaku is less likely to apply when it would result in two adjacent identical CV moras across a morpheme boundary; i.e. the Identity Avoidance constraint blocks rendaku. These blocking and triggering effects of the general Identity Avoidance constraint on rendaku are a new discovery in Japanese phonology, despite the fact that rendaku has been studied extensively in the previous literature, suggesting the importance of experimentation in phonological research. Moreover, our case study offers experimental confirmation of the OCP conspiracy in natural languages. </span></p></div></div></div>
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