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

Abstract

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.

Sound symbolism and theoretical phonology

“…Kumagai argues that this alternation is instead caused by a sound symbolic principle to express cuteness; indeed his experiment shows that [ p ] is judged to be “cuter” than any other consonants. Moreover, he has shown that this alternation interacts with an independently motivated phonotactic constraint that prohibits the [p…[+voice]] configuration (Kawahara, 2018)—nicknames created by the [h]‐[p] alternation are judged to be less natural when they violate *[p…[+voice]]. See Jang (2019) for a similar case found in Korean baby talk, Aegyo .…”

Moraic reversal and realisation: analysis of a Japanese language game

“…It could therefore be argued that the reversing operation of sakasa kotoba is not phonological, but orthographic; the pronunciation of a reversed series of written characters. Previous work has shown an influence of orthography on Japanese language game patterns, as in Itô et al 's (1996) study of zuuja-go, as well as on some phonological processes (Kawahara 2018). Based on the data collected here, we demonstrate that, although some speakers’ forms show some influence of orthography, sakasa kotoba nonetheless involves phonological operations, and cannot be reduced to the manipulation of written characters.…”