Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology by Kubozono Haruo

Author:Kubozono, Haruo [Kubozono, Haruo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2015-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

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Vowels, /N/, and /y/ are all typically voiced, so the obstruent that shows rendaku is more similar to its neighboring segments than a voiceless obstruent would be, although there is no phonotactic restriction against voiceless obstruents in any of the word-medial environments in (13) in modern Tokyo Japanese. A synchronic process or a diachronic change that voices voiceless obstruents in such environments is typically described as a phonetically motivated lenition, but Rosen’s account treats voicing as marked rather than unmarked when a word-medial obstruent is at the left edge of a prosodic word. For Rosen, rendaku is obligatory in a word like makura+gi ‘railroad tie’ (cf. makura ‘pillow’) because ki~gi ‘tree; wood’ is not rendaku-immune and there has to be a foot boundary conciding with the morpheme boundary. Since a prosodic word is limited to at most two feet, the long first element makes it impossible to incorporate the foot containing gi into the same prosodic word, and the result is [ω[ϕmaku][ϕra]]+[ω[ϕgi]]. On the other hand, rendaku can be avoided in a word like niwa+ki ‘garden tree’ (cf. niwa ‘garden’) because the short first element makes it possible to incorporate the entire compound into a single prosodic word: [ω[ϕniwa][ϕki]]. What is counterintuitive about Rosen’s account is that the stronger prosodic boundary between the morphemes in makura+gi triggers the allomorph of the second morpheme that is less natural in word-initial position.

The voiced/voiceless contrast operates word-initially in modern Tokyo Japanese, of course, so the rendaku alternations cannot be attributed to a phonotactic restriction against word-initial voiced obstruents, as the examples in (14) show.

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