Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T02:06:33.533Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Morphological theory and orthography: Kanji as a representation of lexemes1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

AKIKO NAGANO  and
MASAHARU SHIMADA
AKIKO NAGANO*
Affiliation:
Tohoku University
MASAHARU SHIMADA
Affiliation:
University of Tsukuba
*
Authors' address: (Nagano) Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, 6-3-09, Aza-aoba, Aramaki, Aoba-ku, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan, 980-8579[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Orthography has been given marginal status in theoretical linguistics, but it can offer ‘visible’ insights into the invisible mechanisms of grammar. Japanese kanji graphs, Chinese characters used to write Japanese, provide an excellent illustration of this perspective. Our core claim is that the kanji orthography reflects the working of lexeme-based morphology in Japanese grammar. Specifically, we show how the lexeme-based morphological framework developed by Mark Aronoff and Martin Maiden can explain apparently cumbersome and inefficient properties of the kanji usage, its dual pronunciation in particular. Among the findings of this study are the following: (i) the underlying mechanism of the kanji's dual pronunciation is suppletion, native and Sino-Japanese synonyms working as morphomic stems of the same paradigm; (ii) this suppletion emerged and developed as a paradigmatic strategy of synonymy avoidance; and (iii) the large-scale suppletive morphology has long been retained in Japanese because it has served advantageous functions in the maintenance of lexemic isomorphism and in lexical stock expansion. Our findings shed an entirely new light on the bafflingly complex nature of Japanese orthography; it is the complexity of morphology, a grammatical module that is deemed to be the locus of language-specificity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , July 2014 , pp. 323 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

The original manuscript of this paper has been drastically revised following three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees' comments and suggestions. We would like to express our deep gratitude to each of them for carefully reading our manuscript and generously providing us with ideas and data for improvement. Also, we are grateful for the comments from the participants of the ICHL 20 workshop ‘The Role of Autonomous Morphology in Language Change’ (organised by Martin Maiden and John Charles Smith, July 2011, Osaka), where the initial idea of this paper was presented. Our special thanks go to Ewa Jaworska for invaluable editorial support. Needless to say, we are solely responsible for the contents of this paper. This study is financially supported by the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C), No. 24520417).

Abbreviations used in this paper are: 2 = second person, a = adjective, abl = ablative, acc = accusative, Adv = adverbial, agt = agent, C = consonant, Comp = compound, concl = conclusive, gen = genitive, hon = honorific, imp = imperative, Infl = inflection, inf = infinitive, L = lexeme, nom = nominative, P = stem, PAdv = adverbial stem, PComp = compounding stem, PInfl = inflectional stem, pl = plural, prt = particle, SJ = Sino-Japanese, sg = singular, V= vowel, voc = vocative, wfa = word-forming affix.

References

REFERENCES

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2008. The Manambu language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1980. Contextuals. Language 56, 744–758.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1998. Isomorphism and monotonicity: Or the disease model of morphology. In Lapointe, Steven G., Brentari, Diane K. & Farrell, Patrick M. (eds.), Morphology and its relation to phonology and syntax, 411–418. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 2007. In the beginning was the word. Language 83, 803–830.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 2012. Morphological stems: What William of Ockham really said. Word Structure 5, 28–51.Google Scholar
Baerman, Matthew. 2011. Defectiveness and homophony avoidance. Journal of Linguistics 47, 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 2006. Compound. In Brown, Keith (ed.), Encyclopedia of language & linguistics, 2nd edn., 719–726. Amsterdam: Elsevier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 2008. Dvandva. Word Structure 1, 1–20.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 2009. Typology of compounds. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 343–356.Google Scholar
Beard, Robert. 1995. Lexeme-morpheme base morphology: A general theory of inflection and word formation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Beard, Robert & Volpe, Mark. 2005. Lexeme-morpheme base morphology. In Štekauer, Pavol & Lieber, Rochelle (eds.), Handbook of word-formation, 189–205. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Benigni, Valentina & Masini, Francesca. 2009. Compounds in Russian. Lingue e Linguaggio 8.2, 171–193.Google Scholar
Bhatia, Tej K. 2011. Teaching language. In Hogan, (ed.), 842–845.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Booij, Geert. 2005. The grammar of words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Börjars, Kersti & Vincent, Nigel. 2011. The pre-conditions for suppletion. In Galani, Alexandra, Hicks, Glyn & Tsoulas, George (eds.), Morphology and its interfaces, 239–265. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2004. What morphology can tell us about grammar. LFG04 Conference, 141–148. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2010. The evolution of morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2012. The evolution of morphology. In Tallerman, Maggie & Gibson, Kathleen R. (eds.), The Oxford handbook of language evolution, 435–441. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chao, Yuen Ren. 1968. A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Chung-yu. 2007. Multiple-reading characters: Different lexemes or historical layers? Journal of Chinese Linguistics 35, 267–302.Google Scholar
Clark, Eve V. 1993. The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Coulmas, Florian. 2003. Writing systems: An introduction to their linguistic analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Coulmas, Florian. 2011. Social practices of speech and writing. In Hogan, (ed.), 35–45.Google Scholar
Dixon, R. M. W. & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.. 2002. Word: A cross-linguistic typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Don, Jan. 2009. IE, Germanic: Dutch. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 370–385.Google Scholar
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1985. Suppletion in word-formation. In Fisiak, Jacek (ed.), Historical semantics – historical word-formation, 97–111. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Fradin, Bernard. 2009. IE, Romance: French. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 417–435.Google Scholar
Frellesvig, Bjarke. 2010. A history of the Japanese language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fukui, Naoki. 1986. A theory of category projection and its applications. Ph. D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Giegerich, Heinz. 2009. Compounding and lexicalism. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 178–200.Google Scholar
Gilliéron, Jules. 1918. Généalogie des mots qui désignent l'abeille d'après l'ALF. Paris: Champion.Google Scholar
Göksel, Asli. 2009. Compounds in Turkish. Lingue e Linguaggio 8.2, 213–235.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin & Tadmor, Uri. 2009a. The Loanword Typology Project and the World Loanword Database. In Haspelmath, & Tadmor, (eds.), 1–34.Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin & Tadmor, Uri (eds.). 2009b. Loanwords in the world's languages: A comprehensive handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Hayashi, Chikafumi. 2005a. Nihongo no moji to shoki [Japanese graphs and orthography]. In Hayashi, (ed.), 1–21.Google Scholar
Hayashi, Chikafumi (ed.). 2005b. Moji–shoki [Graphs and orthography]. Tokyo: Asakura Shoten.Google Scholar
Hogan, Patrick Colm (ed.). 2011. The Cambridge encyclopaedia of the language sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Inukai, Takashi. 2005. Kanji no nihongo eno tekioo [Adopting Chinese characters into Japanese]. In Hayashi, (ed.), 51–75.Google Scholar
Irwin, Mark. 2009. Mora obstruent allomorphy in Sino-Japanese morphemes: A case of homomorphemic diffusion in Modern Japanese. Saarbrücken: VDV Verlag Dr. Müller.Google Scholar
Irwin, Mark. 2011. Loanwords in Japanese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Itô, Junko. 1990. Prosodic minimality in Japanese. Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 26.2, 213–239.Google Scholar
Itô, Junko & Mester, Armin. 2002. The phonological lexicon. In Tsujimura, (ed.), 62–100.Google Scholar
Kageyama, Taro. 1993. Bunpoo to gokeisei [Grammar and word formation]. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.Google Scholar
Kageyama, Taro. 2009. Isolate: Japanese. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 512–513.Google Scholar
Kaplan, Abby. 2011. How much homophony is normal? Journal of Linguistics 47, 631–671.Google Scholar
Kastovsky, Dieter. 1986. The problem of productivity in word formation. Linguistics 24, 585–600.Google Scholar
Kavanagh, James F. & Mattingly, Ignatius G. (eds.). 1972. Language by ear and by eye: The relationships between speech and reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kess, Joseph E. & Miyamoto, Tadao. 1999. The Japanese mental lexicon: Psycholinguistic studies of kana and kanji processing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Kiefer, Ferenc. 2009. Uralic, Finno-Ugric: Hungarian. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 527–541.Google Scholar
Kondo, Takako. 2005. Kanji to okurigana [Kanji and escorting kana]. In Maeda, Tomiyoshi & Nomura, Masaaki (eds.), Kanji to nihongo [Kanji and Japanese], 146–163. Tokyo: Asakura Shoten.Google Scholar
Koshiishi, Tetsuya. 2011. Collateral adjectives and related issues. Bern: Peter Lang.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kubozono, Haruo. 1995. Gokeisei to oninkoozoo [Word formation and phonological structure]. Tokyo: Kurosio.Google Scholar
Kubozono, Haruo. 2002. Mora and syllable. In Tsujimura, (ed.), 31–61.Google Scholar
Labrune, Laurence. 2012. The phonology of Japanese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lieber, Rochelle & Pavol, Štekauer (eds.). 2009. The Oxford handbook of compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lotz, John. 1972. How language is conveyed by script: A discussion of Klima's and Martin's papers. In Kavanagh, & Mattingly, (eds.), 117–129.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 1992. Irregularity as a determinant of morphological change. Journal of Linguistics 28, 285–312.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2004. When lexemes become allomorphs – on the genesis of suppletion. Folia Linguistica 38, 227–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2005. Morphological autonomy and diachrony. In Booij, Geert & van Marle, Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 2004, 137–175. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2006. Accommodating synonymy: How some Italo-Romance verbs react to lexical and morphological borrowings. In Lepschy, Anna & Tosi, Arturo (eds.), Rethinking languages in contact: The case of Italian, 87–98. Oxford: Legenda.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2008. Lexical nonsense and morphological sense: On the real importance of ‘folk etymology’ and related phenomena for historical linguists. In Eythórsson, Thórhallur (ed.), Grammatical change and linguistic theory: The Rosendal papers, 307–328. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2013. Two suppletive adjectives in Megleno-Romanian. Ms., University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Makita, Kiyoshi. 1968. The rarity of reading disability in Japanese children. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 38, 599–614.Google Scholar
Martin, Samuel E. 1972. Nonalphabetic writing systems: Some observations. In Kavanagh, & Mattingly, (eds.), 81–102.Google Scholar
Matthews, P. H. 1991. Morphology, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Melčuk, Igor. 1994. Suppletion: Toward a logical analysis of the concept. Studies in Language 18.2, 339–410.Google Scholar
Miyajima, Tatsuo. 1981. ‘Mojikeitaisoron’ hihan [Against the ‘graphomorphemic’ analysis]. Kyooikukokugo [Japanese in Education] 66, 21–35.Google Scholar
Miyaoka, Osahito. 2002. Go towa nani ka: Esukimoogo kara nihongo o miru [What is word: Japanese from an Inuit perspective]. Tokyo: Sanseido.Google Scholar
Montermini, Fabio. 2010. Units in compounding. In Scalise, Sergio & Vogel, Irene (eds.), Cross-disciplinary issues in compounding, 77–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montermini, Fabio & Boyé, Gilles. 2012. Stem relations and inflection class assignment in Italian. Word Structure 6, 69–87.Google Scholar
Morioka, Kenji. 1968. Mojikeitaisoron [Graphomorphemes]. Kokugo to Kokubungaku [Japanese Language and Literature] 45.2, 8–27.Google Scholar
Morioka, Kenji. 2004. Nihongo to kanji [Japanese and kanji ]. Tokyo: Meiji Shoin.Google Scholar
Moyna, María Irene. 2011. Compound words in Spanish: Theory and history. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Myhill, John. 2001. Suppletion, lexical meaning, semantic primitives, and translation data. Linguistics 39, 761–802.Google Scholar
Neef, Martin. 2009. IE, Germanic: German. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 386–399.Google Scholar
Niemi, Jussi. 2009. Compounds in Finnish. Lingue e Linguaggio 8.2, 237–256.Google Scholar
Niemi, Sinikka. 2009. Compounds in Swedish. Lingue e Linguaggio 8.2, 257–269.Google Scholar
Nomura, Masaaki. 2008. Kanji no mirai: Sinpan [Kanji's future: New edition]. Tokyo: Sangensha.Google Scholar
Ogura, Hazime, Numamoto, Katsuaki & Hizume, Shuuji. 2005. Kanjion to nihongo [Sounds of Chinese characters and Japanese]. In Hayashi, (ed.), 171–212.Google Scholar
Oshima, Shoji. 2006. Kanjidenrai [Importation of kanji]. Tokyo: Iwanami.Google Scholar
Packard, Jerome L. 2000. The morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, Bill. 2009. Kokota grammar. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press.Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 2003. Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ralli, Angela. 2013. Compounding in Modern Greek. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar
Rice, Keren. 2009. Athapaskan: Slave. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 542–563.Google Scholar
Rio-Torto, Graça & Ribeiro, Sílvia. 2009. Compounds in Portuguese. Lingue e Linguaggio 8.2, 271–291.Google Scholar
Saito, Yasuo. 2012. Shikijinooryoku shikijiritsu no rekishitekisuii: Nihon no keiken [The historical change of literacy and literacy rate in Japan]. Kokusaikyooikukyooryokuronshuu [Journal of International Cooperation in Education, published by Hiroshima University] 15, 51–62.Google Scholar
Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing systems: A linguistic introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Sampson, Geoffrey. 2013. A counterexample to homophony avoidance. Diachronica 30.4, 579–591.Google Scholar
Sasahara, Hiroyuki. 2008. Kunyomi no hanashi: Kanjibunkaken no naka no nihongo [Kun-reading: Japanese in the Chinese-character cultural sphere]. Tokyo: Koobunsha.Google Scholar
Sasanuma, Sumiko, Sakuma, Naoko & Kitano, Kunitaka. 1992. Reading kanji without semantics: Evidence from a longitudinal study of dementia. Cognitive Neuropsychology 9, 465–468.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Christopher K. 2009. Loanwords in Japanese. In Haspelmath, & Tadmor, (eds.), 545–574.Google Scholar
Seeley, Christopher. 1991. A history of writing in Japan. Leiden: E. J. Brill.Google Scholar
Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990. The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shimada, Masaharu. 2013. Coordinate compounds: Comparison between English and Japanese. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 10, 77–96.Google Scholar
Shimada, Masaharu & Nagano, Akiko. 2011. Zi-nouns in Japanese and related issues. Bungeigengokenkyuu [Studies in Language and Literature, published by University of Tsukuba] 59, 75–106.Google Scholar
Shimada, Masaharu, Nagano, Akiko & Okubo, Tatsuhiro. 2013. Lexeme, stem, and word-form: Compounding as a morphosyntactic context. Presented at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Grammatical Word, University of California at Davis.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 2012. Identifying stems. Word Structure 5, 88–108.Google Scholar
Sproat, Richard & Shih, Chilin. 1996. A corpus-based analysis of Mandarin nominal root compound. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 5, 49–71.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Takao. 1963. A semantic analysis of present-day Japanese with particular reference to the role of Chinese characters. Tokyo: The Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Takao. 1975a. On the twofold phonetic realization of basic concepts: In defence of Chinese characters in Japanese. In Peng, Fred C. C. (ed.), Language in Japanese society: Current issues in sociolinguistics, 175–192. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Takao. 1975b. Tozasareta gengo nihongo no sekai [Japanese: An isolated language]. Tokyo: Shinchosha. [Translated into German in 1990, Eine verschlossene Sprache: Die Welt des Japanischen. Münich: Iudicium.]Google Scholar
Suzuki, Takao. 1977. Writing is not language, or is it? Journal of Pragmatics 1, 407–422.Google Scholar
Suzuki, Takao. 1990. Nihongo to gaikokugo [Japanese and foreign languages]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.Google Scholar
Štichauer, Pavel. 2009. Compounds in Czech. Lingue e Linguaggio 8.2, 293–314.Google Scholar
Szymanek, Bogdan. 2009. IE, Slavonic: Polish. In Lieber, & Štekauer, (eds.), 464–477.Google Scholar
Takashima, Toshio. 2001. Nihonjin to kanji [The Japanese and kanji]. Tokyo: Bungeishunjuu.Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard. 2007. Lexical categories. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, 2nd edn., vol. III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 66–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tamaoka, Katsuo & Taft, Marcus. 2010. The sensitivity of native Japanese speakers to on and kun kanji readings. Reading and Writing 23, 957–968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ten Hacken, Pius. 1994. Defining morphology: A principled approach to determining the boundaries of compounding, derivation, and inflection. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.Google Scholar
Tsujimura, Natsuko (ed.). 2002. The handbook of Japanese linguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Uehara, Satoshi & Kumashiro, Fumiko. 2007. Onin keitai no mekanizumu: Ninchioninkeitairon no apuroochi [Phonological and morphological mechanisms: A cognitive linguistic approach]. Tokyo: Kenkyuusha.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald. 2010. Contact and borrowing. In Hickey, Raymond (ed.), The handbook of language contact, 170–187. Malden, MA: Wiely-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Yamada, Yoshio. 1937. Kokugoshi: Mojihen [History of the Japanese language: Scripts]. Tokyo: Toko Shoin.Google Scholar
Yuzawa, Tadayuki. 2006. Kanji no oto–Ichijifukusuuon o chuusin to site [Sounds of kanji: Kanji graphs with multiple sounds]. In Maeda, Tomiyoshi & Nomura, Masaaki (eds.), Kanji no hataraki [Functions of kanji], 17–43. Tokyo: Asakura Shoten.Google Scholar