| Abstract: | This report reexamines 'conflicting directionality' in Japanese mimetic words, a distributional fact in which palatalization is preferentially realized on the rightmost of two coronal consonants, but the leftmost consonant in a word without coronals. Analysis of the original dictionary evidence given in support of this generalization and an exhaustive search of the Japanese mimetic stratum reveals both several counterexamples to conflicting directionality and the fact that the datasets are far too small to support linguistic generalization. The theoretical assumptions employed to account for Japanese mimetic palatalization are thus reexamined, with a focus on clarifying the predictions for future valid examples of conflicting directionality. |
