Shin-ichiro Sano

/p/-driven geminate devoicing in Japanese: Corpus and experimental evidence

Abstract In Japanese loanwords, voiced geminates can be devoiced in the presence of another voiced obstruent (e.g., /doggu/ → /dokku/ ‘dog’). This devoicing pattern has been studied extensively in the recent phonological literature in terms of theoretical modeling as well as from the perspective of experimentation and corpus studies. Less well-known is the observation that /p/ may cause devoicing of geminates as well (e.g., /piramiddo/ → /piramitto/ ‘pyramid’), although to date no objective evidence has been offered to confirm this observation. The current study thus attempts to test this observation objectively by way of a corpus study and two phonological judgment experiments. The results generally support the idea that /p/ can cause devoicing of geminates in Japanese loanwords; in other words, /p/ may trigger Lyman’s Law in causing devoicing of geminates. In addition to this descriptive discovery, throughout the paper we discuss intriguing task effects in phonological experimentation, by comparing the corpus data and the results of the two judgment experiments. Although our aim is primarily descriptive, we offer some analytical possibilities for the /p/-driven devoicing of geminates at the end of the paper.

Durational contrast in gemination and informativity

Abstract Recent studies in Message Oriented Phonology (MOP) have provided increasing evidence that informativity plays a non-trivial role in linguistic behavior. This paper provides a case study of MOP focusing on the durational contrast of singleton and geminate consonants in spoken Japanese. In modern Japanese, short consonants (singletons) and long consonants (geminates) are lexically contrastive, and the durational properties of these consonants are affected by a variety of factors. This provides a useful test of the assumptions of MOP. Based on the assumption that the higher the informativity, the more robustly the contrast is phonetically implemented, this study examines the hypothesis that the durations of singletons and geminates increase or decrease according to the informativity of their durational contrast. The study confirms that (i) the distribution of singletons and geminates is affected by the manner of articulation and positional differences (morpheme-initial, medial, and final); (ii) the distributional differences follow from the informativity of contrasts as represented by Shannon’s entropy; and (iii) the durational contrast is enhanced by the presence or absence of a minimal pair.

The Role of Exemplars and Lexical Frequency in Rendaku

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between lexical frequency and phonological processes, focusing on rendaku in Japanese. Recently, the effect of lexical frequency on linguistic processes, either direct or indirect, has been confirmed in a growing body of studies. However, little attention has been paid to the potential effect of lexical frequency on rendaku. With this background, I examined the effect of lexical frequency on the applicability of rendaku, and developed an analogy-based model by incorporating lexical frequency. The results demonstrate (i) that lexical frequency affects the applicability of rendaku, (ii) less frequent compounds follow the existing patterns that the exemplar offers, and (iii) that rendaku is psychologically real; in other words, rendaku is productively applied to innovative forms, and such an application can be accounted for by the current model.

Optimization of the Verbal Inflectional Paradigm by the Cyclic Application of Morphophonological Processes: Evidence from Potential Forms in Japanese

Abstract In Japanese, a series of morphophonological changes that reorganizes the verbal inflectional paradigms is currently underway. The changes in potential forms involve two innovative processes: ar-Deletion and re-Insertion. This paper analyzes these morphophonological changes in the Japanese potential forms, and models the mechanism that governs the sequential changes, using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. By positing a chronological order between the changes, I argue that the initial change in consonant-final verbs is motivated by semantic disambiguation, and the subsequent change in vowel-final verbs is triggered by analogical leveling for the optimization of the conjugation paradigm. This analogical leveling reorganizes the paradigm in order to counter the increased discrepancy between potential forms of consonant-final verbs and vowel-final verbs caused by the previous change. I propose that positing this two-step process is crucial to understanding the diachronic changes at issue.

The Roles of Internal and External Factors and the Mechanism of Analogical Leveling: Variationist- and Probabilistic OT approach to Ongoing Language Change in Japanese Voice System

This thesis presents an exhaustive research about ongoing language variation and change in the Japanese voice system. Through the analysis I identify the roles of internal and external factors in human linguistic competence that govern the language variation and change, and I construct a model of grammar that inherently includes the language variation and change. This work aims at the formal theoretical analysis primarily built upon the empirical evidence: a huge amount of spontaneous speech data. Until now, a number of researches on language variation and change have been done from various perspectives: The sociolinguistic research, specifically from the perspective of the variationist approach (Labov 1963 et seq., Weinreich et al. 1968), has revealed much about language variation and change, particularly with respect to phonological aspects, focusing on various internal and external factors that govern the phenomena by the quantitative method. However, the formalization of the mechanism of language variation and change is insufficient; the generative grammatical approach (Chomsky 1957) can give a formal account of the phenomena based on the grammatical theory. However, this approach has focused on the language competence as the research subject, and the language use has been overlooked. Thus, the approaches have not cooperated and have not shared their insights. In the grammatical category voice in Japanese, language variation and change which reorganize the conjugation paradigm are currently underway. The process includes three variations: sa-Insertion, ra-Deletion and re-Insertion. The variation and change in voice are related to the functional demand and to morphophonology. Based on these facts, I conducted the research from the perspectives of a variationist approach (Labov 1963 et seq.; Weinreich et al. 1968), and also Optimality Theory (henceforth OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004), specifically the Probabilistic OT (e.g. Boersma 1998; Boersma and Hayes 2001; Goldwater and Johnson 2003; Jager 2004; Jager and Rosenbach 2006), sharing the insights of both paradigms. I employ two large-scale Japanese corpora: the on-line full text database of the minutes of the Diet and the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, complementally taking advantage of the strong points of each corpus for the exhaustive research about language variation and change. The exhaustive research on the corpora brought forth the data which amounts to a total of over 20,000 tokens of the variations. Specifically, I conduct the quantitative analysis employing the spontaneous speech data and examine the roles of internal- and external factors that govern the language variation and change. The data are subject to the factor-by-factor analysis followed by the multivariate analysis. Subsequently, I conduct the grammatical analysis in terms of the Optimality Theory. I set several OT constraints, reinterpreting the results of the quantitative analysis. The Probabilistic OT analysis includes the prediction of the change and the verification of the analysis.…