Identity Avoidance and Lyman's Law

Kawahara, Shigeto; Sano, Shin Ichiro

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.007

Cited by 25 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Another aspect of Rendaku that we would like to make clear at this point is that when we run nonce word experiments on Rendaku, the results invariably show that Rendaku is semi-productive and that there is a rather large between-speaker variability (Kawahara, 2012;Kawahara & Sano, 2014a;Vance, 1979Vance, , 1980. Even when we use nonce words that do not contain any factor that would block Rendaku, not all speakers apply Rendaku 100% of the time, which is likely due to the fact that Rendaku is not fully productive in the contemporary Japanese, as we reviewed above.…”

Section: Background On Rendaku and Lyman's Lawmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Even when we use nonce words that do not contain any factor that would block Rendaku, not all speakers apply Rendaku 100% of the time, which is likely due to the fact that Rendaku is not fully productive in the contemporary Japanese, as we reviewed above. For instance, Kawahara and Sano (2014a) found that nonce words that do not violate Lyman's Law undergo Rendaku about 60% of the time on average. How often native speakers apply Rendaku to nonce words show some variation, and the source of such inter-speaker variability remains a mystery to date.…”

Section: Background On Rendaku and Lyman's Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Existing native words in Japanese, the primary target of Rendaku, do not allow two voiced obstruents within a morpheme (Ito & Mester, 1986, and thus we would not know from the behavior of existing words whether Lyman's Law distinguishes forms with one voiced obstruent and those with two voiced obstruents. Previous experimental studies of Rendaku and Lyman's Law also compared only nonce words with no voiced obstruents and those with one voiced obstruent (Kawahara, 2012;Kawahara & Sano, 2014a;Vance, 1979Vance, , 1980, and thus whether Lyman's Law can count three segments has remained an open question until now. If Kim's (2020) MaxEnt-based proposal is on the right track, since the number of constraint violations are scaled up, we would expect Rendaku applicability to be lowest in the two voiced obstruent condition.…”

Section: Overall Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lyman’s Law can count only up to two

Kawahara

Kumagai

2023

Laboratory Phonology

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One long-standing question that is recurrently addressed in contemporary phonological studies is whether phonological systems can count beyond three. The traditional view is that phonological systems can count only up to two but not more (e.g., Ito & Mester, 2003; McCarthy & Prince, 1986); some scholars, however, recently argue that phonological system should actually be able to count beyond three (e.g., Paster, 2019; Kim, 2022). The current experiments address this general question regarding counting by studying Rendaku and Lyman’s Law in Japanese. Rendaku is a morphophonological process in which the morpheme-initial voiceless obstruent of a second member of a compound becomes voiced. The application of Rendaku is significantly reduced if the second member already contains a voiced obstruent, a generalization that is known as Lyman’s Law. Experiment 1 compared the applicability of Rendaku in nonce words which contain one voiced obstruent (e.g., [taguta]) and those which contain two voiced obstruents (e.g., [tegebi]). If Lyman’s Law counts beyond three, Rendaku application is predicted to be more substantially reduced in the latter condition, as Rendaku would create morphemes which contains three voiced obstruents (i.e., [degebi]). The results show, however, that no meaningful differences were observed between the two conditions. Experiment 2 tested the recent claim that two nasal consonants may reduce the applicability of Rendaku (Kim, 2020; Kumagai, 2017), which, if true, suggests that Lyman’s Law disfavors a configuration in which a voiced obstruent is followed by two nasals. The experimental results show that the evidence for the blockage of Rendaku by two nasals is weak at best if present at all. Overall, we conclude that there is no strong evidence that Lyman’s Law counts (Ito & Mester, 2003).

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Section: Background On Rendaku and Lyman's Lawmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Background On Rendaku and Lyman's Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Overall Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lyman’s Law can count only up to two

Kawahara

Kumagai

2023

Laboratory Phonology

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“…Rendaku, for instance, interacts with several kinds of linguistic information, such as branching structures and morphosyntactic categories (Kubozono 2005;Vance & Irwin 2016), which cannot be reduced to orthography. Rendaku is also blocked by Identity Avoidance constraints (Kawahara & Sano 2014a;2014b;Tanaka 2017), as well as by OCP(labial) (Kawahara et al 2006;Kumagai 2017). It also interacts with pitch accent, in such a way that rendaku often correlates with unaccentedness in compounding (Sugito 1965;Zamma 2005;Kurisu 2010).…”

Section: Rendaku Is Also Sensitive To Phonologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman’s Law

Kawahara

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper argues that phonology and orthography go in tandem with each other to shape our phonological behavior. More concretely, phonological operations are non-trivially affected by orthography, and phonological constraints can refer to them. The specific case study comes from a morphophonological alternation in Japanese, rendaku. Rendaku is a process by which the first consonant of the second member of a compound becomes voiced (e.g., /oo/ + /tako/ → [oo+dako] 'big octopus'). Lyman's Law blocks rendaku when the second member already contains a voiced obstruent (/oo/ + /tokage/ → *[oo+dokage], [oo+tokage] 'big lizard'). Lyman's Law, as a constraint which prohibits a morpheme with two voiced obstruents, is also known to trigger devoicing of geminates in loanwords (e.g. /beddo/ → [betto] 'bed'). Rendaku and Lyman's Law have been extensively studied in the past phonological literature. Inspired by recent work that shows the interplay between orthographic factors and grammatical factors in shaping our phonological behaviors, this paper proposes that rendaku and Lyman's Law actually operate on Japanese orthography. Rendaku is a process that assigns dakuten diacritics, and Lyman's Law prohibits morphemes with two diacritics. The paper shows that a set of properties of rendaku and Lyman's Law follows from this proposal. However, since some aspects of rendaku and Lyman's Law are undoubtedly phonological, the ultimate conclusion is that it is most fruitful to recognize a model of phonology in which it has access to orthographic information. Several consequences of the current proposal are discussed.

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“…The first of these is the grammatical approach, where rendaku is regarded as a morphophonological rule (e.g. Ito & Mester, 1986, 2003Kawahara & Sano, 2014;Kubozono, 2005;Otsu, 1980). The second of these is the lexical approach, where rendaku is regarded as a lexical property; in other words, the information about whether or not items undergo rendaku is stored in the lexicon on an item by item basis (e.g.…”

Section: Research On Rendakumentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Exemplars and Lexical Frequency in Rendaku

Sano

2015

Open Linguistics

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This paper examines the relationship between lexical frequency and phonological processes, focusing on rendaku in Japanese. Recently, the effect of lexical frequency on linguistic processes, either direct or indirect, has been confirmed in a growing body of studies. However, little attention has been paid to the potential effect of lexical frequency on rendaku. With this background, I examined the effect of lexical frequency on the applicability of rendaku, and developed an analogy-based model by incorporating lexical frequency. The results demonstrate (i) that lexical frequency affects the applicability of rendaku, (ii) less frequent compounds follow the existing patterns that the exemplar offers, and (iii) that rendaku is psychologically real; in other words, rendaku is productively applied to innovative forms, and such an application can be accounted for by the current model. Keywords: rendaku, lexical frequency, Exemplar Theory, corpus, phonological process, voicing, analogy, similarity, psychological reality, productivity IntroductionThis paper examines the relationship between lexical frequency and phonological processes, focusing on rendaku (also known as sequential voicing) in Japanese. In recent years, the role of lexical frequency in shaping phonological patterns has been extensively discussed in a range of linguistic phenomena, specifically in the studies of language variation and change. The effect of lexical frequency on linguistic processes, either direct or indirect, has been confirmed in a growing body of studies (Bybee, 2001(Bybee, , 2002(Bybee, , 2010Erker & Guy, 2012;Frisch, 2011;Johnson, 2007; Phillips, 2006;Pierrehumbert 2002Pierrehumbert , 2006.1 For example, in usage-based and exemplar theoretic models of phonology, where the lexicon is assumed to be a highly interconnected network of lexical exemplars (words or phrases) with rich information including frequency distribution (Bybee, 2001(Bybee, , 2002Johnson, 2007;Pierrehumbert, 2002Pierrehumbert, , 2006, highly frequent words have stronger mental representations and are more accessible during production; while infrequent words have weaker mental representations, and hence are more difficult to access. This difference in the strength of the mental representation is believed to drive variation and change, at least to some degree. In particular, highly frequent words are more likely to undergo phonological processes or to be the target of sound change; on the other hand, low-frequency words are more likely to be regularized, or to be the target of analogical change.Thus, given these previous findings, it seems reasonable to assume that lexical frequency plays some role also in the distribution of rendaku, a morphophonological pattern in Japanese. However, little # I would like to thank Shigeto Kawahara, Timothy Vance, Kevin Heffernan, and the members of the Keio phonetics-phonology study group for their invaluable comments. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers. This project is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant #26770147, #2...

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Identity Avoidance and Lyman's Law

Cited by 25 publications

References 18 publications

Lyman’s Law can count only up to two

Lyman’s Law can count only up to two

Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman’s Law

The Role of Exemplars and Lexical Frequency in Rendaku

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