Unproductive alternations and allomorph storage: the case of Sino-Japanese

Abstract

This paper examines the phonology of Sino-Japanese within the framework of Optimality Theory, incorporating elements from Itō and Mester’s (1999) coreperiphery model. A major component of Itō and Mester’s model-the unmarked status of Yamato words-was challenged by Kawahara, Nishimura, and Ono (2002), who argued that Sino-Japanese must be the unmarked option. While it is true that Sino-Japanese is the least marked stratum, automatically declaring the least-marked stratum as the default incorrectly predicts that speakers will overgeneralize alternations regardless of their productivity. Taking inspiration from Kurisu’s (2000) analysis of Sino-Japanese geminates and Mascaró’s (2007) formalization of allomorphy, I propose that where a lower stratum’s alternations are unproductive, speakers actually store all allomorphs in the underlying form, thus exempting the stratum from the implicated faithfulness constraint. This allows the unindexed faithfulness constraint to be ranked higher as needed to ensure that only productive alternations are extended to novel items.