Rendaku

Morphophonemic sequential voicing.

Occurs in compounds and prefix+base constructions.

Obligatory Contour Principle

"An identical element or feature is prohibited from occuring more than once within a certain domain" (Kubuzono).

Newer loan words tend not to exhibit rendaku regardless of how frequently they are used.

However, rendaku does occur in compounds containing

older loanwords

yudetamago

yamakaji

yamakawa

yasuhoteru

Exceptions:

yasubeya

Right Branch Condition

Methodology

Our native speaker was given an alphabetized list of 75 words written in kanji and kana (where necessary.) Roughly 2/3 of the words were various compounds, while the remaining 1/3 were included to act as red herrings.

voiced

Great lover of octopi

Lover of big octopi

________ stops become _____ at the beginning of the second element of a compound word.

"Rendaku applies only when a potential rendaku segment is in a right branch constituent at the lowest level."

Ootakozuki

Oodakozuki

Nurihashibako

Nuribashibako

Voiceless

Lacquered box for chopsticks

Box for lacquered chopsticks

-Tsujimura

Types of compounds

Behave

different

ways

[[oo][karakami]]

[oogarakami]

'a large paper sliding door'

When part of a compound, these follow the RBC.

Strict Compounds: [ [kara][kami] ] 'paper sliding door'

Loose Compounds: [ [kara][gami] ] 'Chinese paper'

Dvanda Compounds: [ [yama][kawa] ] 'mountains and rivers'

Rendaku tends to apply most regularly in these compounds

These never exhibit rendaku.

Data

For the most part the elicited utterances produced by our speaker coincided with the expected form. There was only one compound to which our native speaker did not apply rendaku.

Lyman's Law.

Rendaku

One explanation for the origin of rendaku is that historically, compounds were formed by the construction noun+GENITIVE+noun. Where this sequence preceded a voiceless stop it was contracted into a voiced stop.

However if this is the case, then we cannot account for compounds containing adjectives.

Elicited Data:

Analysis

Our data supports both Lyman's Law and the Obligatory Contour Principle and provides further evidence that newly adopted words are much less likely to exhibit rendaku. Unfortunately we have no data regarding the Right Branch Constraint.

z

s

d

t

tegami

hashibako

hoshizora

tomodachi

tojimari

te + kami

hashi + hako

hoshi + sora

tomo + tachi

to + shimari

g

k

b

h

v

j

s

Short Comings

Our data did not contain any examples the RBC nor Strict Compounds, and only included one example of a Dvanda Compound. Furthermore, our word list only included existing words and compounds; in order to judge the effectiveness of the existing rules for predicting when rendaku will occur, we would have had to include fake compounds.