| ROA: | 243 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Phonological analysis of Japanese adaptations of foreign words |
| Authors: | Shigeko Shinohara |
| Comment: | These, University of Sorbonne-Nouvelle, around 200 pages, in French |
| Length: | 0 |
| Abstract: | Phonological analysis of Japanese adaptations of foreign words (1997) Shigeko SHINOHARA University of Sorbonne-Nouvelle We analyse "Japanese adaptations" of foreign words (mostly from French and English). By "adaptation" we mean the process whereby Japanese native speakers adjust foreign words in such a way that the resulting forms are acceptable as Japanese sound sequences. Forms of foreign origin such as adapted forms often possess characteristics not found in native words. A comparison between an adapted form and the corresponding word in the source language reveals the rules and constraints of Japanese as well as Universal Grammar (UG). Our main goals are to show: 1) the significance of the constraint-based approach to phonology; 2) the role of UG in the adaptation process. Data are analysed in the Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993ab, 1995). OT defines the grammar of a particular language as a hierarchy of universal constraints. The constraints are divided into two broad categories: structural constraints reflecting unmarked forms as defined by UG and Faithfulness constraints for preservation of input properties. Interactions between properties of foreign sounds and the strength of the structural constraints in Japanese as well as some effects of UG become visible in adaptation processes. Some of the major results are as follows. The accent of English adaptations reflects the source while French adaptations assign their accent by default. This is analysed in terms of a trochaic footing with nonfinality -a metrical structure that previous research has shown to play a role in hypocoristics, truncations and so on. Reflections of UG constraints that appear in the accentuation include the avoidance of prominence on epenthetic vowels. In the adaptation of dental plosives before high vowels, a UG preference for voiceless affricates over voiced ones emerges. The input sequence /tu/ is adapted with an affricate [ts] while /du/ adaptation avoids the affrication. When the vowel is epenthetic, the constraint barring a [tu] sequence and faithful rendering of the plosive are respected by lowering the vowel to [o]. We also study the gemination for input word final consonants as a result of the UG stem-syllable edge alignment. The type of gemination observed (vowel or consonant) is constrained by the length of the preceding vowel and also by the UG preference for voiceless over voiced geminates. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |