John Benjamins Publishing Company
If rendaku isn’t a rule, what in the world is it?
Abstract
The morphophonemic voicing phenomenon in Japanese known as rendaku is highly irregular, but several factors are believed to make rendaku more or less likely. This paper reviews some experiments intended to test the psychological reality of three such factors: Lyman’s Law, the semantic relationship between the two elements in noun + verb compound nouns, and salient semantic or phonological resemblances between novel compounds and existing compounds. The evidence suggests that each of these factors has at least a detectable effect on responses in experimental situations. Any realistic overall account of rendaku will have to incorporate a significant degree of intractable irregularity, but it will also have to be consistent with the intuition of naïve native speakers that rendaku is predictable.
Abstract
The morphophonemic voicing phenomenon in Japanese known as rendaku is highly irregular, but several factors are believed to make rendaku more or less likely. This paper reviews some experiments intended to test the psychological reality of three such factors: Lyman’s Law, the semantic relationship between the two elements in noun + verb compound nouns, and salient semantic or phonological resemblances between novel compounds and existing compounds. The evidence suggests that each of these factors has at least a detectable effect on responses in experimental situations. Any realistic overall account of rendaku will have to incorporate a significant degree of intractable irregularity, but it will also have to be consistent with the intuition of naïve native speakers that rendaku is predictable.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgement vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction: Situating usage-based (Japanese) linguistics 1
-
Part 1. Cognition and language use
- Subordination and information status 13
- On state of mind and grammatical forms from functional perspectives 37
- Grammar of the internal expressive sentences in Japanese 55
- Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and Japanese grammar 85
- What typology reveals about modality in Japanese 109
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Part 2. Frequency, interaction and language use
- If rendaku isn’t a rule, what in the world is it? 137
- The semantic basis of grammatical development 153
- Interchangeability of so-called interchangeable particles 171
- The re-examination of so-called ‘clefts’ 193
- Activity, participation, and joint turn construction 223
-
Part 3. Language change and variation
- Context in constructions 261
- The use and interpretation of “regional” and “standard” variants in Japanese conversation 279
- Index 305
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgement vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction: Situating usage-based (Japanese) linguistics 1
-
Part 1. Cognition and language use
- Subordination and information status 13
- On state of mind and grammatical forms from functional perspectives 37
- Grammar of the internal expressive sentences in Japanese 55
- Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and Japanese grammar 85
- What typology reveals about modality in Japanese 109
-
Part 2. Frequency, interaction and language use
- If rendaku isn’t a rule, what in the world is it? 137
- The semantic basis of grammatical development 153
- Interchangeability of so-called interchangeable particles 171
- The re-examination of so-called ‘clefts’ 193
- Activity, participation, and joint turn construction 223
-
Part 3. Language change and variation
- Context in constructions 261
- The use and interpretation of “regional” and “standard” variants in Japanese conversation 279
- Index 305
