A sound-symbolic alternation to express cuteness and the orthographic Lyman’s Law in Japanese

Abstract

The current study deals with two topics. One is the new nicknaming trend in Japanese whereby [h] alternates with [p]. In Experiment I, I established the hypothesis that the process is driven to express cuteness, and experimentally demonstrated that singleton [p] is more likely to be associated with cuteness than other consonants in Japanese. The other topic discussed in the current paper is the orthographic Lyman’s Law, or OCP(diacritic) (Kawahara, Shigeto. 2018. Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman’s Law. Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 3(1). 1–24.). In Experiment II, I tested whether OCP(diacritic) is psychologically real in the minds of Japanese speakers, using nicknames with [h]→[p] alternation already applied. The results showed that the naturalness of nicknames is reduced when they contain singleton [p] and voiced obstruents, both of which need a diacritical mark in hiragana and katakana. This suggests that OCP(diacritic) is active in nicknaming processes beyond rendaku and devoicing of voiced geminates. Experiment II also showed that the naturalness of nicknames is affected by other OCP effects such as OCP(C), OCP(CV), and OCP(labial). This result suggests that such OCP effects impinge on the patterns resulting from nicknaming formation.

A wug-shaped curve in sound symbolism: the case of Japanese Pokémon names

“…Phonological patterns and sound-symbolic patterns share two important properties, stochasticity and cumulativity, both of which follow naturally from a MaxEnt grammar. This conclusion in turn implies that sound symbolism may not be as irrelevant to formal phonological theory as has been assumed in the past, echoing the claim recently made by several researchers (Alderete & Kochetov 2017, Kumagai 2019, Jang 2020, Kawahara 2020b, Shih 2020). 17…”

“…To the extent that cumulativity is a general property of phonological patterns (McPherson & Hayes 2016, Zuraw & Hayes 2017, Breiss 2020, Hayes 2020), and if sound-symbolic effects show similar cumulative properties, then we may conclude that there exists a non-trivial parallel between phonological patterns and sound-symbolic patterns (Kawahara 2020a). This parallel would lend some credibility to the hypothesis that sound symbolism is a part of ‘core’ linguistic knowledge, as has recently been argued (Alderete & Kochetov 2017, Kumagai 2019, Jang 2020, Kawahara 2020a, b, Shih 2020). This is a rather radical conclusion, given the fact that sound symbolism has long been considered as being outside the purview of theoretical linguistics.…”

“…all syllables were open. Moreover, because of its potentially salient sound-symbolic values, such as cuteness (Kumagai 2019), [p] was excluded from the stimuli.…”

“…Expressive palatalisation may thus instantiate a case in which sound-symbolic constraints coerce phonological changes. See Kumagai (2019) and Jang (2020) for other possible examples.…”

Sound symbolism and theoretical phonology

“…These alternations driven by sound symbolic principles can interact with other phonological considerations within a single grammatical system. To illustrate, Kumagai (2019) shows that in Japanese nickname formation, /h/ can be turned into [p] (e.g., / h aruka/→ [ p aruru]). It is hard to consider this alternation to be caused by a phonological constraint, since [p] is at best a marked segment in the native phonology of Japanese (Ito & Mester, 1995).…”