The psychological status of a constraint on Japanese consonant alternation

Vance, Timothy J.

doi:10.1515/ling.1980.18.3-4.245

Cited by 46 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…/nise+tokage/ → [nise-tokage] 'fake lizard') Mester, 1986, 2003;Lyman, 1894). Vance (1980) found in a nonce-word experiment that the closer the blocker consonant, the less likely that Rendaku occurs. Therefore, we expect that in words in which the trigger and geminates are non-local, speakers may find devoicing of OCP-violating geminates less natural.…”

Section: Seven Hypotheses Testedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, one problem identified by Kawahara (in press) is that these theoretical claims have been primarily based on intuitions of Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Several studies have shown potential pitfalls of an approach purely relying on authors' introspections (see, among others, Alderete and Kochetov 2009;Dabrowska 2010;Gibson and Fedorenko 2010;Griner 2001;Kawahara in press;Labov 1975Labov , 1996Myers 2009;Ohala 1974Ohala , 1986Schütze 1996;Vance 1980 and references cited therein). Since several important theoretical claims have been made based on the Japanese devoicing data, their empirical foundation should ideally be supported by systematic experimentation with a number of theoretically-unbiased native speakers.…”

Section: The Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing

Kawahara

2011

J East Asian Linguist

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Nishimura (2003) first pointed out that in Japanese loanwords, voiced geminates devoice optionally when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent i.e. when they violate OCP(voice) (e.g. /baggu/ → [bakku] 'bag'). This devoicing of geminates has been used to make several theoretical claims in the recent phonological literature. However, these claims have so far largely been based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Kawahara (in press) addressed this problem by conducting a rating study. The first aim of this study, building on Kawahara (in press), is to further support the empirical foundation of these theoretical claims by way of a large-scale rating study. The current study shows that (i) the OCP and geminacy each affect naturalness rating of devoicing, and (ii) that there is nevertheless something special about the combination of the OCP and geminacy.The second aim is to test an assumption behind the recent literature on this phenomenon.The assumption is that this devoicing pattern is monolithic-i.e. all voiced geminates uniformly undergo devoicing in a certain phonological environment. The current experiment shows that this assumption is too simplistic. In particular it shows (i) speakers rate the devoicing of affricates as natural as that of stops, (ii) speakers find devoicing of items that merge with other lexical items less natural, (iii) speakers rate devoicing as more natural when there are multiple triggers, (iv) speakers find devoicing of [dd] more natural than that of [gg], and (v) speakers find devoicing of more frequent items more natural.2

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Section: Seven Hypotheses Testedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Phenomenonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing

Kawahara

2011

J East Asian Linguist

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“…Native Japanese phonology generally does not allow stems with two voiced obstruents. OCP(voice) also blocks Rendaku, voicing of the initial consonant of the second member of a compound, when the second member already contains a voiced obstruent (Itô & Mester, 1986;Vance, 1980). OCP(voice) in Japanese targets voicing only in obstruents, but not in sonorants (Itô & Mester, 1986;Mester & Itô, 1989).…”

Section: The Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…OCP(voice) in Japanese targets voicing only in obstruents, but not in sonorants (Itô & Mester, 1986;Mester & Itô, 1989). See Vance (1980) for an experiment on OCP-induced blockage of Rendaku.…”

Section: The Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since dissimilatory force is cross-linguistically known to be stronger between two closer elements (Frisch et al, 2004;Suzuki, 1998), one may expect that devoicing of these two words may be considered to be less natural. In fact, Vance (1980) shows in his nonceword experiment that the blockage of Rendaku due to OCP(voice) (see footnote 1) is more likely when the trigger is closer. 7 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer who pointed out that these post-hoc analyses may be informative.…”

Section: Non-local Ocpmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Japanese loanword devoicing revisited: a rating study

Kawahara

2011

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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In Japanese loanword phonology, geminates optionally devoice when there is another voiced obstruent within the same stem, i.e., geminates may optionally devoice when they violate OCP(voice). This devoicing of OCP-violating geminates has received much attention in the recent phonological literature. However, the debates centering around this phenomenon have relied primarily on intuition-based data, and no systematic wellformedness judgment experiments have been performed. This paper fills that gap. The experiment reported in this paper shows that Japanese speakers do find devoicing of geminates natural when there is another voiced stop within the same word, i.e., when the geminates violate OCP(voice). The experiment moreover finds other interesting aspects of devoicing: (i) the naturalness of devoicing of OCP-violating geminates correlates positively with the lexical frequencies of the words in question, (ii) the naturalness of devoicing of OCP-violating geminates is not significantly affected by place of articulation, (iii) speakers find (context-free) devoicing of geminates more natural than devoicing of OCP-violating singletons, and (iv) speakers find the devoicing of OCP-violating singletons more natural in word-medial position than in word-initial position.

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Rendaku-Based Lexical Hierarchies in Japanese: The Behaviour of Sino-Japanese Mononoms in Hybrid Noun compounds

Irwin

2005

J East Asian Linguis

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Takayama (1999) recently proposed a new rendaku-based vocabulary stratum hierarchy for Japanese, in which what he terms a ''vulgarized Sino-Japanese'' stratum is treated separately from, and occupies a more core position than, the traditional Sino-Japanese (SJ) stratum. However, Takayama deliberately excludes from his analysis one particular subset of the SJ vocabulary layer, monomorphemic SJ lexemes (SJ mononoms), and focuses exclusively on bimorphemic SJ lexemes (SJ binoms), claiming that analytical difficulties caused by another voicing phenomenon known as shindaku (Okumura (1952)), which occurs only in the SJ stratum, hampers any attempt to ascertain the frequency of rendaku amongst SJ mononoms. As it has been established that the stratum to which the initial element in a dual element noun compound belongs is not a factor conditioning rendaku in the second element (Ohno (2000)), examining comparatively under-researched hybrid noun compounds whose second element is a SJ mononom allows us to bypass any interference caused by shindaku and establish the frequency of rendaku occurrence amongst SJ mononoms. Such a corpus of hybrid noun compounds whose second element is a SJ mononom is presented here, to the author's knowledge the first time any such corpus has appeared in print, an analysis of which shows that rendaku is in fact more than twice as likely to occur amongst SJ mononoms as amongst SJ binoms. When a further dynamic, the faithfulness of SJ mononoms to a prosodic size factor proposed by Rosen (2001) for native Japanese lexemes, is taken into consideration, it is clear that not only, at the very least, must Takayama's vulgarized SJ stratum be amended to incorporate SJ mononoms, but that there is also a strong case for proposing an independent vulgarized SJ mononom stratum occupying an even more central position than the vulgarized SJ binom stratum.

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The psychological status of a constraint on Japanese consonant alternation

Cited by 46 publications

References 6 publications

Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing

Aspects of Japanese loanword devoicing

Japanese loanword devoicing revisited: a rating study

Rendaku-Based Lexical Hierarchies in Japanese: The Behaviour of Sino-Japanese Mononoms in Hybrid Noun compounds

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