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A sound-symbolic alternation to express cuteness and the orthographic Lyman’s Law in Japanese

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Published/Copyright: May 3, 2019
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Abstract

The current study deals with two topics. One is the new nicknaming trend in Japanese whereby [h] alternates with [p]. In Experiment I, I established the hypothesis that the process is driven to express cuteness, and experimentally demonstrated that singleton [p] is more likely to be associated with cuteness than other consonants in Japanese. The other topic discussed in the current paper is the orthographic Lyman’s Law, or OCP(diacritic) (Kawahara, Shigeto. 2018. Phonology and orthography: The orthographic characterization of rendaku and Lyman’s Law. Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 3(1). 1–24.). In Experiment II, I tested whether OCP(diacritic) is psychologically real in the minds of Japanese speakers, using nicknames with [h]→[p] alternation already applied. The results showed that the naturalness of nicknames is reduced when they contain singleton [p] and voiced obstruents, both of which need a diacritical mark in hiragana and katakana. This suggests that OCP(diacritic) is active in nicknaming processes beyond rendaku and devoicing of voiced geminates. Experiment II also showed that the naturalness of nicknames is affected by other OCP effects such as OCP(C), OCP(CV), and OCP(labial). This result suggests that such OCP effects impinge on the patterns resulting from nicknaming formation.

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Note

This study was presented at the 25th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (University of Hawai’i) and the 1st conference on Pokémonastics (Keio University). I would like to thank Takeru Honma, Shigeto Kawahara, Changyun Moon, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.


Published Online: 2019-05-03
Published in Print: 2019-05-27

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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