16.795, Review: Phonology/Morphology: Ito & Mester (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-795. Wed Mar 16 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.795, Review: Phonology/Morphology: Ito & Mester (2003)

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1)
Date: 15-Mar-2005
From: Michael Barrie < mike.barrie at utoronto.ca >
Subject: Japanese Morphophonemics: Markedness and Word Structure 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 03:00:46
From: Michael Barrie < mike.barrie at utoronto.ca >
Subject: Japanese Morphophonemics: Markedness and Word Structure 
 

AUTHORS: Ito, Junko; Mester, Armin 
TITLE: Japanese Morphophonemics
SUBTITLE: Markedness and Word Structure
SERIES: Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 42
PUBLISHER: MIT Press
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-991.html


Michael Barrie, Manami Hirayama, Sara Mackenzie and Kenji Oda, University 
of Toronto

OVERVIEW

Ito and Mester (2003) (hereafter I&M) provide a comprehensive analysis of 
the phonology of voicing in Japanese. Their analysis focuses on the well-
known morphophonological process known as rendaku (or sequential voicing) 
in which the initial segment of the second member of a compound is voiced:

(1)
a. /kaki/ 'persimmon' -> hosi-gaki 'dried persimmon'
b. /tana/ 'shelf' -> hon-dana 'book shelf' 

There are two kinds of restrictions observed with regard to the 
phenomenon: One is that the process cannot occur when the second member 
already contains a voiced obstruent ---this restriction is widely known 
as "Lyman's Law." 

(2) /kaze/ 'wind' -> kami-kaze (but *kami-gaze) 'God's wind'

The other restriction is that the process applies only to the native 
vocabularies and some of the vocabularies of old loanwords from Chinese. 
Thus, the recent loans from Western languages do not show rendaku:

(3) kappu 'cup' -> koohii-kappu (but *koohii-gappu) 'coffee cup'

Both restrictions are taken up by I&M and analyzed using constraint 
conjunction and differentiation of faithfulness constraints according to 
particular strata of the Japanese lexicon.

Chapter 1 outlines the structure of the book, listing both the empirical 
domain of investigation and the theoretical issues which are addressed 
throughout. In terms of empirical phenomena, this monograph considers the 
morpheme structure constraint that allows only a single voiced obstruent 
to occur within native roots and rendaku and the interaction of these 
phenomena as seen in Lyman's Law, illustrated in (2) above. Other areas 
considered in the text include diachronic variation and lexical 
stratification. Theoretical issues that will be considered throughout the 
book, including self-conjunction of markedness constraints and the use of 
faithfulness constraints which make reference to particular lexical strata 
are introduced in this chapter.

Chapter 2 provides theoretical and empirical foundations for the rest of 
the book. First, I&M question the validity of autosegmental Obligatory 
Contour Principle (OCP) analyses of dissimilative effects. I&M propose 
that dissimilative effects should instead be analyzed as a case of 
crossing a markedness threshold; that is, a grammar finds it undesirable 
to violate a markedness constraint twice in a certain domain while it 
tolerates a single violation. In order to express the notion of threshold 
while preserving the strict ranking system of OT, I&M employ the mechanism 
of local constraint conjunction.

The second purpose of chapter 2 is to introduce a markedness threshold 
analysis of the morpheme structure constraint barring multiple voiced 
obstruents from occurring in Japanese roots. I&M provide data showing that 
no Yamato (native) morpheme contains more than one voiced obstruent 
although voicing itself is contrastive in the language. The observation 
that voicing is contrastive in Japanese generally indicates that the 
constraint prohibiting the occurrence of voiced obstruents, which I&M call 
NO-D, is ranked below the IDENT constraint requiring faithfulness to input 
values of [voice]. However, I&M take the ban on multiple voiced obstruents 
in native morphemes as evidence that the self-conjoined version of NO-D 
(NO-D^2) dominates IDENT, providing the ranking NO-D^2 >> IDENT >> NO-D. 
Finally, I&M point out that multiple voicing restriction of Japanese is 
not exceptionless but that the multiple voicing restriction is easily 
violated by foreign and ideophonic items. I&M state that this does not 
reflect a historical fact about Japanese phonology, but rather indicates 
that certain synchronic phonological restrictions are active only in some 
strata of the Japanese lexicon.

Chapter 3 extends the self-conjoined markedness analysis of OCP effects to 
a wider range of phenomena. These include dissimilative degemination in 
Latin, Amharic and Japanese as well as deaccentuation in Japanese 
compounds. In all cases, I&M argue that the autosegmental OCP is ill-
equipped to handle these phenomena. In the degemination cases, an 
autosegmental analysis is not available due to the common assumption that 
the OCP is active only within the level of segmental features and does not 
apply to prosodic properties such as length. The markedness threshold 
approach advocated by I&M, on the other hand, can be extended to these 
cases straightforwardly through the use of a self-conjoined markedness 
constraint *Geminate^2. This chapter also includes a discussion of some 
theoretical implications of constraint conjunction, both problematic and 
promising discussing, in particular, Spaelti's (1997) Universal Conjoined 
Constraint Ranking Hypothesis. 

Chapter 4 discusses the morphological and phonological aspects of rendaku 
upon which I&M formulate their analysis. After explaining how OCP effects 
are captured by self-conjoined markedness constraints which outrank 
relevant faithfulness constraints in the previous chapters, I&M apply this 
approach to rendaku voicing. They argue first that rendaku voicing is the 
result of a voicing morpheme that links the two sub-components of the 
compound, and that this morpheme is preserved in rendaku compounds by a 
constraint that requires this morpheme to be realized. They then discuss 
various morphological considerations for rendaku, such as the difference 
between word compounds and root compounds, and why rendaku is active only 
in the former. With the morphological facts out of the way, the authors 
implement their proposal described above (self-conjoined faithfulness 
constraints and compound morphemes) into an OT analysis of rendaku, 
accounting for the effects of Lyman's Law. 

Chapter 5 discusses the issue of domains in the patterning of OCP effects 
and voicing alternations in Japanese. I&M first address generally the 
domains of conjoined and self-conjoined constraints. They introduce the 
concept of Minimal Shared Domain as the local domain of a conjunction. The 
domains of self-conjunction are discussed for the analysis of 
dissimilation in rendaku, which involves the self-conjoined markedness 
constraint on voiced obstruents, No-D^2. Looking at diachronic change, I&M 
show that more than one domain is possible for dissimilation; prosodic, 
specifically the Prosodic Word (PW), in Old Japanese and 
grammatical/lexical, specifically the morpheme, in Modern Japanese. 
Moreover, they analyze this variation as the result of diachronic 
reranking of the PW-domain version of No-D^2 in the hierarchy when the 
hierarchy also has the morpheme-domain version of No-D^2. Furthermore, 
they consider a prediction made for the conceivable rendaku-type voicing 
patterns. The possible patterns can all arise from the hierarchy developed 
in their analysis, while the hierarchy successfully excludes an unattested 
and impossible pattern. They argue that because their analysis can 
necessarily prevent the impossible pattern in this way, their approach is 
superior to others that put the base on linear precedence relations.

Chapter 6 asks for a mechanism that can account for the fact that certain 
constraints are operative in certain vocabulary groups but not in others: 
what does a grammar look like that can generate such lexical variation? 
The key is the FAITH stratification model: an individual grammar fixes a 
particular markedness hierarchy and the stratum-specific faithfulness 
constraints insert themselves in the hierarchy in different places. I&M 
start off with the general typological markedness law, or implicational 
relationship, found in language inventories as a place where the proposed 
model can explain the variation. They also illustrate the same model with 
patterns stratified sociolinguistically by different registers. With 
particular focus on Japanese, the stratum variation in voicing is 
discussed. The authors demonstrate that the faithfulness model can explain 
the lexicon-internal variation as a kind of faithfulness variation; here 
the faithfulness constraints are from the family of IDENT, specified for 
designated lexical strata, and inserted at specific points in the 
hierarchy. 

The empirical foundation of chapter 7 concerns faithfulness in voicing as 
it applies to rendaku voicing; however, I&M use the discussion here to 
comment more deeply on the issue of faithfulness in OT in general. The 
first section concerns the use of the faithfulness constraint IDENT [VOI] 
which the authors take to apply only to obstruents. They then ask whether 
IDENT [VOI] is asymmetric in the sense that voicing of a voiceless segment 
is equally as punishable as devoicing of a voiced segment. I&M provide 
data from Old Japanese to show that devoicing of a voiced segment 
constitutes a more serious violation than the inverse scenario. They 
explore the possibility that IDENT [VOI] can be split into IDENT [+VOI], 
which outranks the more general IDENT [VOI], not the expected polar 
opposite constraint IDENT [-VOI]. I&M conclude, however, that symmetric 
IDENT is superior (i.e., referring to both positively and negatively 
valued features). To capture the asymmetric faithfulness facts, they 
propose that IDENT constraints must be conjoined with markedness 
constraints.

Chapter 8 addresses the pattern of rendaku found in complex compounds 
(complex compounds defined as compounds which contain compounds as 
members). I&M begin with the observation that in left-branching compounds 
rendaku applies iteratively, voicing the initial segment of each member. 
For example, /hosi/ 'dried', /kaki/ 'persimmon', /tukuri/ 'making', when 
combined are realized as [hosigakizukuri] showing rendaku voicing on 
both /kaki/ and /tukuri/. In right-branching compounds, however, rendaku 
voicing does not apply at the juncture between the subcompound and the 
additional constituent. For example, /hatu/ 'first', /kao/ 'face', /awase/ 
meeting', when joined in a compound are realized as [hatukaoawase] without 
rendaku voicing on the initial /k/ of /kao/. I&M seek an account of these 
facts that does not require reference to syntactic information such as 
direction of branching. 

First, they show that an analysis relying on output-output constraints, 
while initially appealing, is unworkable. They propose an alternative 
analysis which makes reference to prosodic structure. They note that the 
compounds in which rendaku applies regularly differ from the compounds in 
which rendaku is suppressed at the major constituent juncture in that the 
former are always a single accentual domain whereas the latter may contain 
two accents and are hence considered to be two prosodic words. They then 
derive the pattern of rendaku from self-conjunction of the constraint 
ANCHOR-L. This constraint penalizes multiple violations of a constraint 
requiring the left edge of a grammatical word to correspond to the left 
edge of a prosodic word. Appropriate ranking of this constraint requires 
right-branching compounds to be parsed as two prosodic words whereas left-
branching compounds can be parsed as a single prosodic word without 
violating this self-conjoined constraint. An additional markedness 
constraint militating against voiced obstruents at the beginning of a 
prosodic word is required to derive the pattern of rendaku. This analysis 
is followed by some general consideration of the role of positional 
faithfulness constraints and positional markedness constraints in OT. I&M 
argue that, although the two types of constraints are equal in many 
circumstances, the positional markedness approach is superior in this case.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

This monograph is an important addition to the literature on rendaku in 
Japanese. It offers a vast empirical coverage of the phenomenon with 
abundant examples throughout the text and an extensive appendix. From a 
theoretical perspective, this monograph makes important contributions to 
the study of constraint conjunction and lexical stratification within OT. 
As a whole, the authors offer a plausible analysis of rendaku, offering 
several advantages over previous approaches. 

The book offers a cohesive and comprehensive analysis of lexical 
stratification, as described above. This analysis is particularly 
attractive given its ability to relate stratal distinctions to 
implicational hierarchies and its ability to account for some groups of 
apparent exceptions to exceptions, as in the case of Common Sino-Japanese 
words that undergo rendaku. Also, the difference in rendaku strategies 
between modern Japanese and Old Japanese is accounted for by a simple 
constraint re-ranking - a desirable solution.

Nevertheless, we have a few concerns with the analysis and its 
presentation. First, the historical facts are explained by a constraint re-
ranking in which the markedness constraint No-D^2_w is demoted in Modern 
Japanese (p. 111ff). This analysis requires further scrutiny from a 
broader discussion of issues of diachronic change in OT, particularly in 
light of claims that diachronic change tends to involve demotion of 
faithfulness rather than markedness constraints  (Hayes, 2004 and Uffmann, 
2003). 

Second, it is necessary to explain explicitly what limits the application 
of constraint conjunction. I&M's analysis as a whole relies heavily on the 
notion in various ways (e.g., self-conjoined markedness constraints for 
the analysis of dissimilation and markedness thresholds, conjunction of 
markedness and faithfulness constraints to account for asymmetric effects 
of voicing and devoicing, and multiply conjoined constraints in their 
analysis of degemination in Amharic). I&M acknowledge the potential 
problems in learnability and restrictiveness that constraint conjunction 
may lead to. They state that distinguishing reasonable from unreasonable 
conjoined constraints 'cannot be relegated to the syntax of conjunction' 
but rather is an is an issue of 'phonological substance and phonetic 
groundedness' (p. 24). While we agree on intuitive grounds with such an 
idea, we are left unsatisfied as little discussion of phonetic substance 
or formal restrictions on the well-formedness of simple constraints is 
provided. Furthermore, I&M mention (p. 265 endnote #23) that no convincing 
evidence for No-D^3 has been found, although it is formally derivable, as 
NO-D^2&NO-D. While the observation is generally agreeable, it is left 
unanswered how such a restriction is naturally deduced from the theory.

Lastly, we would like to mention the learnability issue related to the 
proposed faithfulness-based stratal model. In the proposed model, the 
burden of the explanation for lexical-class-specific application of 
certain rules, such as rendaku, is upon the positioning of class-specific 
faithfulness constraints to the fixed hierarchy of antagonistic markedness 
constraints. This implies that each lexical item has a 'tag' that 
indicates the stratum it belongs to in order to be properly evaluated. 
This is indeed true of any model of grammar that refers to lexical strata. 
But this may cast a question with regard to learnability: how learnable is 
this kind of grammar? The question about learnability is not addressed in 
I&M's discussion. Of course this is not a problem particularly for the 
analysis that I&M provide, and the organization of the lexicon is a 
controversial topic (see Tateishi 2002, for example, for a summary). 

In conclusion, this monograph is invaluable both empirically and 
theoretically. Empirically I&M continue to set the standards of what must 
be accounted for in the phonology of voicing in Japanese. Theoretically 
the book is a major contribution to Optimality Theory. Thus, it is highly 
recommended to a variety of people who wish to have a descriptive 
foundation of Japanese morphophonology and wish to pursue developments in 
phonological theory within the framework of OT.

REFERENCES

Hayes, Bruce (2004) Phonological acquisition in optimality theory: the 
early stages. Ms. University of California. [Also published in Kager, 
Rene, Pater, Joe, and Zonneveld, Wim (eds.) Fixing  priorities: 
Constraints in phonological acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press.]

Spaelti, Philip (1997) Dimensions of reduplication in multi-pattern 
reduplication. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Tateishi, Koichi (2002) Bunpoo no itibu to shiteno goisoo no zehi (Lexical 
strata as a part of grammar), Onsei Kenkyu (Journal of the Phonetic 
Society of Japan) 6, 34-43.

Uffmann, Christian (2003) Markedness, faithfulness, and creolization: The 
retention of the unmarked. In Ingo Plag (ed.), The phonology and 
morphology of creole languages. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 3-23. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWERS

Michael Barrie, Manami Hirayama, Sara Mackenzie and Kenji Oda are all 
graduate students at the University of Toronto. They formed a small 
reading group where they discussed this monograph and they all have an 
interest in the phonology of East Asian languages.





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