Identity Avoidance and Rendaku

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).

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Lyman’s Law can count only up to two

Kumagai

2023

Laboratory Phonology

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“…whose Rendaku is independently known to be inhibited (Kawahara & Sano 2014b), which was thus excluded. One example, [netami-sonemi] 'jealous,' was excluded as a coordinate compound.…”

Section: Re-examining the Empirical Basis Of The Claimmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…conditions were controlled as much as possible; however, sometimes that would result in some stimuli sounding too similar to an existing word to us, both of whom are native speakers of Japanese, which was avoided. Since it has been shown that Rendaku may be substantially inhibited when it results in identical CV mora sequences across a morpheme boundary (Kawahara & Sano 2014b), no forms began with [se], since the E1 used in the experiment was [nise] 'fake' (see below).…”

Section: Vls-vls One Nasal Two Nasalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rendaku is not blocked by two nasal consonants: A reply to Kim (2022)

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

Kumagai

2023

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Rendaku is a morphophonological process in Japanese, in which the first consonant of the second element of compounds becomes voiced (e.g. /ao-sora/ → [ao-zora] ‘blue sky’). In a recent paper, Kim (2022) argues that the presence of two nasals—but not one nasal— in the second element reduces the probability of Rendaku application (e.g. /umi-kamome/ → [umi-kamome], *[umi-gamome] ‘seagull’). This claim has an important consequence for grammatical theories, as it would constitute a case in which the influences of two segments add up to block a phonological process, a pattern that is referred to as “super-additive counting cumulativity.” We have reexamined the empirical basis of this claim, and have found that there are only four relevant lexical items. Moreover, two of these items actually undergo Rendaku almost all the time, and there are thus only two items whose Rendaku is clearly blocked. The empirical basis of the theoretical claim based on Rendaku thus seems to be weak at best. With this, we move on to the main contribution of this paper, which is a new nonce-word experiment that aimed to resolve the conflicting results from the previous studies on this topic. The results of the current experiment show that the applicability of Rendaku is not reduced by the presence of two nasal consonants.

“…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

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

2018

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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.