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.
2000The lexical nature of Rendaku in Japanese. Japanese/Korean Linguistics 9, Mineharu Nakayama & Charles J. Quinn Jr. (eds), 151–164. Stanford CA: CSLI.
1991A History of Writing in Japan. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Shinmura, Izuru
(ed.)1998Kōjien, 5th edn. Tokyo: Iwanami.
Sugioka, Yoko
1986Interaction of Derivational Morphology and Syntax. New York NY: Garland. (University of Chicago PhD dissertation, 1984).
Sugioka, Yoko
2005Multiple 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
2004Alternations of m and b in Early Middle Japanese: The deeper significance of the sound-symbolic stratum. Japanese Language and Literature38: 323–337.
Vance, Timothy J
1980The psychological status of a constraint on Japanese consonant alternation. Linguistics 18: 245–267.
Vance, Timothy J
1987An Introduction to Japanese Phonology. Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Vance, Timothy J
1991A new experimental study of Japanese verb morphology. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 13: 145–166.
Yamaguchi, Kyoko
2011Accentedness and Rendaku in Japanese deverbal compounds. Gengo Kenkyu 140: 117–134.
Cited by (4)
Cited by 4 other publications
Tanaka, Yu
2024. Learning biases in proper nouns. Phonology► pp. 1 ff.
Kawahara, Shigeto & Gakuji Kumagai
2023. Lyman’s Law can count only up to two. Laboratory Phonology 14:1
Kawahara, Shigeto
2015. Can we use rendaku for phonological argumentation?. Linguistics Vanguard 1:1 ► pp. 3 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 july 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.