Full Description
The papers in this tightly focused collection all report recent research on aspects of rendaku ('sequential voicing'), the well-known morphophonemic phenomenon in Japanese that affects initial consonants of non-initial elements in complex words (mostly compounds). The papers include broad surveys of theoretical analyses and of psycholinguistic studies, meticulous assessments (some relying on a new database) of many of the factors that putatively inhibit or promote rendaku, an investigation of how learners of Japanese as foreign language deal with rendaku, in-depth examinations of rendaku in a divergent dialect of Japanese and in a Ryukyuan language, and a cross-linguistic exploration of rendaku-like compound markers in unrelated languages. Since rendaku is ubiquitous but recalcitrantly irregular, it provides a challenge for any general theory of morphophonology. This collection should serve both to restrain oversimplified accounts of rendaku and to inspire to further research.
Contents
1. List of contributors; 2. Introduction (by Vance, Timothy J.); 3. Generative treatments of rendaku and related issues (by Kawahara, Shigeto); 4. Psycholinguistic studies of rendaku (by Kawahara, Shigeto); 5. Rendaku and Identity Avoidance: Consonantal Identity and moraic Identity (by Kawahara, Shigeto); 6. Rendaku awareness of Japanese learners in Taiwan: Students at Ming Chuan University (by Nakazawa, Nobuyuki); 7. The Rendaku Database (by Irwin, Mark); 8. Rosen's Rule (by Irwin, Mark); 9. Rendaku and individual segments (by Vance, Timothy J.); 10. Rendaku in Okinawan (by Serafim, Leon A.); 11. Rendaku in Tohoku Japanese: The Kahoku-cho Survey (by Miyashita, Mizuki); 12. Rendaku in cross-linguistic perspective (by Labrune, Laurence); 13. A rendaku bibliography (by Irwin, Mark); 14. References; 15. Index
