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Of those studies which have examined rendaku from a statistical angle, most have been small-scale, employing restricted corpora or micro-databases and often focused on specific conditions. The lack of a large-scale corpus was the impetus behind the creation of the Rendaku Database, available online for ongoing and future research. In this paper, both the initial and non-initial elements of approximately 28,000 compounds are subjected to a detailed analysis: by vocabulary stratum, length, part of speech, accent pattern, and frequency, as well as by the value of the moras straddling either side of the element boundary. Among the core findings are that initial elements which are verbs show aberrantly low rendaku rates, while non-initial elements which are deadjectival nouns, and those which begin in h, both exhibit considerably higher than average rendaku rates.

Loanwords in Japanese undergo a variety of truncation processes, including mora-clipping. Mora-clipping can itself be subdivided into back- (e.g. čokoreeto > čoko ‘chocolate’), fore- (wanisu > nisu ‘varnish’) and mid-clipping (moruhine > mohi ‘morphine’). Although back-clipping is the unmarked process, this paper seeks to answer a major issue as yet unresolved in the literature: at which mora are back-, fore- and mid-clippings typically clipped, and why? Although previous studies have claimed that syllable structure plays a major role, many exceptions remain unexplained.

Rendaku in many Tōhoku dialects is manifested in the form of prenasalized voicing, and this paper provides a case study of rendaku in the dialect of Kahoku-chō, Yamagata Prefecture. After describing prenasalized voicing and its relationship to rendaku, the paper reports the results of a study conducted in 2012 on speakers of the Kahoku dialect. Prenasalization did not occur at all uniformly in the productions of the survey participants; there was considerable variation, both between speakers and between target words. Also, while sex and socio-economic group were not predictors, age was, with the oldest participant having the highest prenasalization rate. Given the complex social and historical situation regarding dialect use in Japan, the Kahoku dialect has undoubtedly been altered lexically, morphologically, and phonologically.

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