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Japanese apophonic compounds

  • Laurence Labrune EMAIL logo and Mark Irwin
Published/Copyright: April 2, 2021
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Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive description and analysis of Japanese apophonic compounds, such as ama-gasa (ame + kasa), ko-kage (ki + kage) or kamu-tikara (kami + tikara), in which the initial element exhibits one of three different pairs of final vowel alternations. The three pairs involved are e ∼ a, i ∼ o, and i ∼ u. To determine the controlling factors for apophony, its morphological function, its overall characteristics and its interaction with other compositional devices of Japanese (mainly rendaku) we constructed a database of 2,322 compounds. Each compound has as an element at least one of 22 “apophonic nouns” which may undergo vowel alternation when the initial element in a compound. The core results of this study are that there exists a range of morphological, lexical and phonological factors which tend to favour or disfavour apophony. The phonological factors mostly pertain to the length of either element in the compound. Further, it was also found that apophony is generally not linked, either positively (redundancy of morphological devices) or negatively (economy of morphological devices), to rendaku.


Corresponding author: Laurence Labrune, Département Sciences du Langage, Bordeaux Montaigne University, 33607Pessac Cedex, France, E-mail:

Funding source: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Award Identifier / Grant number: 18K00603

Funding source: French National Centre for Scientific Resarch, CLLE (UMR5263)

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the two reviewers at the Japanese Journal of Linguistics, and two reviewers at Phonological Studies for helpful comments. This research has been presented on several occasions: we wish to express our gratitude to the audiences at both the Phonology Forum (Tokyo, August 2019) and the 24th Paris Meeting in East Asian Linguistics (Paris, July 2016). We are particularly grateful to Marine Guerry for help with the statistics. This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant 18K00603 to the second author, and by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CLLE research team) to the first author.

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Published Online: 2021-04-02
Published in Print: 2021-05-26

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