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The diachronic origins of Lyman's Law: evidence from phonetics, dialectology and philology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2021

Timothy J. Vance Open the ORCID record for Timothy J. Vance [Opens in a new window] ,
Shigeto Kawahara Open the ORCID record for Shigeto Kawahara [Opens in a new window]  and
Mizuki Miyashita
Timothy J. Vance*
Affiliation:
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
Shigeto Kawahara*
Affiliation:
Keio University
Mizuki Miyashita*
Affiliation:
University of Montana
*
*E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
*E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
*E-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].
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Abstract

Modern Japanese has a set of morphophonemic alternations known collectively as rendaku that involve initial consonants in second elements of compounds, as in /jama+dera/ ‘mountain temple’ (cf. /tera/ ‘temple’). An alternating element like /tera/ ~ /dera/ has an initial voiced obstruent in its rendaku allomorph and an initial voiceless obstruent in its non-rendaku allomorph. Lyman's Law blocks rendaku in a second element containing a medial voiced obstruent. This paper gives three arguments that Lyman's Law originated as a constraint prohibiting prenasalisation in consecutive syllables. First, constraints on similar consonants in close proximity generally apply not to voicing but to features with phonetic cues that are more spread out, such as prenasalisation. Second, in some Japanese dialects with prenasalised voiced obstruents, rendaku cannot occur if it would result in adjacent syllables containing these marked consonants. Third, phonographically attested Old Japanese compounds are consistent with a constraint on adjacent syllables.

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Articles
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Phonology , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 479 - 511
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research reported in this paper was supported by two projects at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo. The first (‘the rendaku project’) ran from 2011 until 2016, and the second, ‘Cross-linguistic studies of Japanese prosody and grammar’ (headed by Haruo Kubozono), began in 2016 and is still running. Support for the Kahoku-chō Survey (described in §5.1) came from the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, and we are grateful to the many citizens of Kahoku-chō who helped us so generously. We would also like to Zendō Uwano for sharing his insights with us. We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to three anonymous referees and a Phonology associate editor for their careful and constructive comments on the drafts of this paper. Thanks to their efforts, the final product has dramatically improved. Any remaining errors and deficiencies are entirely our responsibility.

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