| ROA: | 1208 |
| Title: | Geminate devoicing in Japanese loanwords: Theoretical and experimental investigations |
| Authors: | Shigeto Kawahara |
| Comment: | A review article on geminate devoicing in Japanese. Submitted. Comments welcome. |
| Length: | p. 19 |
| Abstract: | This paper provides an overview of theoretical and experimental investigations of voiced geminates in Japanese. Active discussion was initiated by Nishimura’s (2003) discovery that in Japanese loanword phonology, voiced geminates can be devoiced, when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent (e.g. /doggu/ → /dokku/). This context-sensitive devoicing of geminates has received much theoretical attention since then, and has been analyzed within several different theoretical frameworks. Subsequently, the phonetic and psycholinguistic natures of voiced geminates have also been explored, in tandem with corpus-based analyses and compu- tational modeling. It thus seems safe to say that this devoicing pattern of voiced geminates in Japanese has had some substantial impacts in the recent theoretical literature and related field. The empirical focus of this paper is on one simple devoicing phenomenon in Japanese, but implications for general linguistic theories are discussed throughout. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | Japanese, OCP, geminates, harmonic grammar, maxent grammar, phonetic naturalness, judgment, lexical frequency, corpus studies |
| Article: | Version 1
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