If rendaku isn’t a rule, what in the world is it?
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.
References
Hamano, Shoko
2000 Voicing of obstruents in Old Japanese: Evidence from the sound-symbolic stratum.
Journal of East Asian Linguistics
9: 207–225.
Hasegawa, Kiyoshi, et al.
(eds) 1986
Ōbunsha waei chūjiten
. Tokyo:
Ōbunsha.
Ihara, Mutsuko & Murata, Tadao
2006 Some experiments on sequential voicing.
On’in Kenkyū/Phonological Studies
9: 17–24.
Jorden, Eleanor & Ito Chaplin, Hamako
1962
Beginning Japanese
, Part II. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Jorden, Eleanor & Noda, Mari
1988
Japanese: The Spoken Language
, Part 2. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
Kawahara, Shigeto
2012 Lyman’s law is active in loanwords and nonce words: Evidence from naturalness judgment studies.
Lingua
122: 1193–1206.
Kazama, Rikizō
(ed.) 1979
Tsuzuriji gyakujun hairetsu gokōsei ni yoru Daigenkai bunrui goi
. Tokyo: Fuzanbō.
Kindaichi, Haruhiko
1976 Rendaku no kai.
Sophia Linguistica
2: 1–22.
Kitahara Yasuo
(ed.) 1990
Nihongo gyakubiki jiten
. Tokyo: Taishūkan.
Kiyose, Gisaburō N
1985 Heianchō hagyō-shiin p-onron.
Onsei no Kenkyū
21: 73–87.
Klafehn, Terry
2003 Emergent Properties of Japanese Verb Inflection. PhD dissertation, University of Hawai‘i.
Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo
1962
Gendai zasshi kyūjusshu no yōgo yōji, Vol. 1: Sōki oyobi goihyō
. Tokyo: Shūei Shuppan.
Kozman, Tam
1998 The psychological status of syntactic constraints on Rendaku
.
Japanese/Korean Linguistics 8
,
David Silva (ed.), 107–120. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Lyman, Benjamin Smith
1894
The Change from Surd to Sonant in Japanese Compounds
. Philadelphia PA: Oriental Club of Philadelphia.
Martin, Samuel E
1952
Morphophonemics of Standard Colloquial Japanese. Supplement to Language
[Language Dissertation No. 47].
Matsumura, Akira
(ed.) 1988
Daijirin
. Tokyo: Sanseidō.
Miyake, Takeo
1932 Dakuon-kō.
Onsei no Kenkyū
5: 135–90.
Nakamura, Kumiko & Vance, Timothy J
2002
Rendaku in noun + verb-stem compounds: A production task. Paper presented at LP’2002, Urayasu, Chiba.
NHK Hōsō Bunka Kenkyūjo
(ed.) 1998
Nihongo hatsuon akusento jiten
, new edn. Tokyo: Nippon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai.
Ohno, Kazutoshi
2000 The lexical nature of Rendaku in Japanese.
Japanese/Korean Linguistics 9
,
Mineharu Nakayama &
Charles J. Quinn Jr. (eds), 151–164. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Okumura, Mitsuo
1955 Rendaku.
Kokugogaku jiten
,
Kokugo Gakkai (ed.), 961–962. Tokyo: Tōkyōdō.
Sakurai, Shigeharu
1966 Kyōtsūgo no hatsuon de chūi subeki kotogara.
Nihongo hatsuon akusento jiten
,
Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai (ed.), 31–43. Tokyo: Nihon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai.
Seeley, Christopher
1991
A History of Writing in Japan
. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Shinmura, Izuru
(ed.) 1998
Kōjien
, 5th edn. Tokyo: Iwanami.
Sugioka, Yoko
1986
Interaction of Derivational Morphology and Syntax
. New York NY: Garland. (University of Chicago PhD dissertation, 1984).
Sugioka, Yoko
2005 Multiple mechanisms underlying morphological productivity.
Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley’s Legacy
,
Salikoko S. Mufwene,
Elaine J. Francis &
Rebecca S. Wheeler (eds), 204–223. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Unger, J. Marshall
2004 Alternations of m and b in Early Middle Japanese: The deeper significance of the sound-symbolic stratum.
Japanese Language and Literature
38: 323–337.
Vance, Timothy J
1980 The psychological status of a constraint on Japanese consonant alternation.
Linguistics
18: 245–267.
Vance, Timothy J
1987
An Introduction to Japanese Phonology
. Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Vance, Timothy J
1991 A new experimental study of Japanese verb morphology.
Journal of Japanese Linguistics
13: 145–166.
Yamaguchi, Kyoko
2011 Accentedness and Rendaku in Japanese deverbal compounds.
Gengo Kenkyu
140: 117–134.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Kawahara, Shigeto
2015.
Can we use rendaku for phonological argumentation?.
Linguistics Vanguard 1:1
► pp. 3 ff.
Kawahara, Shigeto & Gakuji Kumagai
2023.
Lyman’s Law can count only up to two.
Laboratory Phonology 14:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.