Incomplete Neutralization in Japanese Monomoraic Lengthening

Abstract

Incomplete neutralization (IN) (Port et al. 1981, Fourakis & Iverson 1984, Port & O’Dell 1985) refers to cases in which two underlyingly distinct segments become nearly identical on the surface. IN has posed a challenge for traditional views of the phonetics-phonology interface. While classical modular feedforward architectures (e.g. Chomsky & Halle 1968, Bermúdez-Otero 2007) generally do not allow underlying phonological representations to directly affect phonetic realization, incompletely neutralized contrasts show subphonemic distinctions on the surface that can only be inferred from the underlying representations. We show that the combination of two independently motivated theoretical mechanisms—paradigm uniformity (Benua 1997, Steriade 2000) and weighted phonetic constraints (Legendre et al. 1990, Zsiga 2000, Flemming 2001, Pater 2009)—automatically account for the IN patterns.

Phonetic neutralization in Palestinian Arabic vowel shortening, with implications for lexical organization

“…For example, [baːlen] 'bags' has the same vowel durations as [daːlen] 'valleys', although their singular forms, [baːl] and [dal], differ in vowel length. In Japanese, however, Braver & Kawahara (2015) found that long vowels derived through a rule lengthening monomoraic Prosodic Words were 32 ms shorter than underlyingly long vowels, despite behaving as long in the phonology. Finally, a pilot study by Rudin (1980) found that Turkish long vowels derived from two short vowels, through a rule of intervocalic /g/-deletion, were 31 ms. longer than underlyingly long vowels (292 vs 261 ms).…”

Modelling incomplete neutralisation with weighted phonetic constraints

“…In spite of the identical surface mora counts in (4b) and (4c) (due to lengthening in the case of (4b)), Braver & Kawahara (2016) found that the vowel durations of lengthened monomoraic nouns were not identical to those of underlyingly long nouns. In that study, twelve native speakers of Japanese were presented with 15 sets of three nouns: (a) a short noun with a case particle (no lengthening), (b) a short noun without a case particle (lengthening expected) and (c) an underlyingly long noun.…”

“…In this section, I describe the phenomenon of incomplete neutralisation in Japanese monomoraic noun lengthening (Mori 2002, Braver & Kawahara 2014, 2016). This case will be used in §4 to illustrate the proposed model.…”

“…When these monomoraic nouns appear in isolation within a prosodic word (e.g. without a case particle), they are produced with vowels of intermediate length – longer than canonical short vowels, but shorter than underlyingly long vowels (Mori 2002, Braver & Kawahara 2014, 2016). Underlyingly bimoraic nouns in the same environment do not show such lengthening.…”

“…Incomplete neutralisation of final devoicing has also been reported in Catalan (Dinnsen & Charles-Luce 1984), Dutch (Warner et al 2004, though see the article itself and Warner et al 2006 for caveats), Russian (Dmitrieva 2005, Kharlamov 2012, Matsui 2015) and Polish (Gianinnia & Cinque 1978, Slowiaczek & Dinnsen 1985, Slowiaczek & Szymanska 1989, though see Jassem & Richter 1989 for counterevidence). In addition to incomplete neutralisation in final devoicing, incomplete neutralisation has been found in flapping in American English (Fisher & Hirsh 1976, Fox & Terbeek 1977, Zue & Laferriere 1979, Herd et al 2010, Braver 2014), morphological tone in Cantonese (Yu 2007), 5 coda aspiration in Eastern Andalusian Spanish (Gerfen 2002) and monomoraic noun lengthening in Japanese (Braver 2013, Braver & Kawahara 2014, 2016).…”