17.1589, Review: Phonology/East Asian Lang: van de Weijer et al (2005)

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Subject: 17.1589, Review: Phonology/East Asian Lang: van de Weijer et al (2005)

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1)
Date: 22-May-2006
From: Mark Irwin < irwin at human.kj.yamagata-u.ac.jp >
Subject: Voicing in Japanese 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 21:18:39
From: Mark Irwin < irwin at human.kj.yamagata-u.ac.jp >
Subject: Voicing in Japanese 
 

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-76.html 

EDITORS: van de Weijer, Jeroen; Nanjo, Kensuke; Nishihara, Tetsuo
TITLE: Voicing in Japanese
SERIES: Studies in Generative Grammar 84 
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2005

Mark Irwin, Faculty of Literature & Social Sciences, Yamagata 
University

SYNOPSIS:

'This book presents a number of studies which focus on the [voice] 
grammar of Japanese, paying particular attention to historical 
background, dialectal diversity, phonetic experiment and phonological 
analysis' (p. 1), with the initial version of some of the papers having 
being presented at the Linguistics and Phonetics 2002 workshop at 
Meikai University, Urayasu, Japan. Of the 14 papers in this volume, 
ten deal with consonant (Part I) and four with vowel voicing (Part II), 
with seven of the contributions to Part I dealing wholly or largely with 
the well-documented allomorphic phenomenon of sequential voicing, 
or 'rendaku' in the Japanese tradition (by which term the phenomenon 
will be referred to henceforth). Perspectives within a variety of 
theoretical frameworks are offered. 

Part I of the volume opens with Kubozono's review (pp. 5-24) of past 
work on rendaku. Within the space constraints available, a 
comprehensive summary is necessarily impossible and the author 
confines himself to a survey of the conditions which define the 
phenomenon's synchronic domain. He deals first with 'Lyman's Law', 
treating it as an example of the Obligatory Contour Principle and 
arguing that its standard domain requires widening in some instances. 
A second condition is the branching constraint, whose status 
Kubozono questions for rendaku while offering supporting evidence 
for this constraint in general from accentual phrasing. The final 
condition examined is that of the mora, the most recent and perhaps 
the weakest constraint on rendaku, where the author seeks to 
integrate the behaviour of one specific morpheme, hon 'book', into a 
wider framework in which it is claimed the prosodic word in Japanese 
is optimally up to four moras in length. 

Couched within the representational framework, Rice (pp. 25-45) 
argues that the voicing features active in rendaku and post-nasal 
voicing should not be considered as one single type. Instead, she 
posits a 'dual mechanism' hypothesis, under which a laryngeal voicing 
feature is identified with rendaku and a sonorant voicing feature with 
post-nasal voicing. The author also considers problems highlighted by 
her hypothesis which are inherent in recently proposed lexical 
stratification models for Japanese. 

Ohno (pp. 47-69) traces the historical orthography of what is known in 
the Japanese tradition as the sei-daku distinction and which, in the 
contemporary language, marks the voiced-voiceless feature in 
obstruents. While 'provid[ing] neither new data nor new findings' (p. 
47), he outlines the three historical stages of sei-daku orthography 
and reviews the two main arguments which seek to explain them. The 
author closes with brief summaries of the sei-daku distinction in the 
modern language and the important issue of whether it may have 
been one of prenasalization rather than voicing in the past. 

Within the framework of Element Theory, Nasukawa (pp. 71-87) 
presents an analysis of laryngeal source contrasts. Of the two 
autonomous melodic categories available for cross-linguistic source 
contrasts under this theory, the author claims that Japanese exploits 
the category contributing prevoicing in representation of phonation-
type contrasts. Support for this claim is offered from assimilatory and 
concatenating processes, early language acquisition and aphasic 
deficit.

Vance (pp. 89-103) provides a statistical analysis of rendaku 
incidence in inflected words, i.e. verb+verb compounds and 
compounds containing adjectives. Contrary to the established opinion 
that verb+verb compound verbs tend away from and verb+verb 
compound nouns tend towards rendaku, he reports that, in fact, in the 
vast majority of cases rendaku does not occur in either. He also finds 
that compounds containing adjectives tend overwhelmingly towards 
exhibiting rendaku.

Fukazawa & Kitahara (pp. 105-121) re-examine work on Japanese 
core-periphery vocabulary models (specifically Ito & Mester (1995, 
2001)) developed to counter the problem of single invariant ranking in 
Optimality Theory (cf. Rice in this volume, who re-evaluates essentially 
the same body of work). They present three ranking paradoxes in 
consonant voicing which they claim cannot be accounted for in these 
models, arguing that etymologically motivated sub-lexica cannot exist 
in Japanese phonological grammar and that these must be replaced 
with sub-lexica based on standard morphophonological categories. 

Yamane-Tanaka (pp. 123-156) draws parallels between synchronic 
cross-dialectal variation in intervocalic prenasalized stops and their 
probable diachronic development since the Old Japanese period. 
After presenting an Optimality Theory analysis of these two continua, 
she tackles the issue of prenasalization versus voicing in Old 
Japanese and beyond (i.e. the historical nature of the sei-daku 
distinction: see Ohno in this volume) and suggests that a gradual loss 
of prenasalization has gradually led to an increased role for voicing 
contrast.

Zamma (pp. 157-176) undertakes a detailed examination of the 
complicated rendaku patterning seen in Japanese surnames. He first 
discusses the generalization put forward by Sugito (1965), that 
accented surnames tend to undergo rendaku while accentless 
surnames do not, as well as the suggestion made by Kubozono (this 
volume) as to the influence of the onset of the final mora of the 
preceding morpheme. He then moves on to examine these general 
claims within the context of a much wider database of surname head 
morphemes and concludes that their widely varying behaviour 
presents considerable theoretical problems.

A survey of rendaku incidence in loanwords is offered by Takayama 
(pp. 177-190), who argues that those few loanwords from the foreign 
word group (the author eschews 'stratum') that exhibit rendaku do so 
only because they have merged into non-foreign word groups due to 
their phonotactics or their semantics (they represent 'an 
unsophisticated object'). Takayama further claims that the larger 
number of Sino-Japanese lexemes that exhibit rendaku can be 
explained by setting up a 'vulgarized SJ' word group, which can be 
differentiated stylistically from a 'formal SJ' word group and whose 
members may be rendaku targets. 

Part I of the volume closes with Suzuki's (pp. 191-204) presentation of 
the results of his study into the problems of the automated speech 
recognition of Japanese numeral-classifier compounds. Many 
classifiers beginning in a voiceless obstruent (e.g. hon, cylinder-
shaped object) exhibit context-dependent (morphophonemic) voicing 
after certain numerals (e.g. san.bon, '3...'), as well as context-
independent (free) variation (e.g. ichi ~ hito, 'one'), and both these 
present performance problems for the author's Large-Vocabulary 
Continuous Speech Recognition engine. The solution and the test 
results that Suzuki puts forward show that the engine's performance 
can be improved by making probability adjustments in order to cover 
unseen data in the corpus.

Part II is opened by Maekawa & Kikuchi (pp. 205-228), who present 
an interim report on their corpus-based analysis of vowel devoicing in 
spontaneous speech, which utilizes some 23 hours of the Corpus of 
Spontaneous Spoken Japanese containing approximately 427,000 
vowel segments. Although, as the authors point out, it is often stated 
in introductory texts that high vowels are devoiced between two 
voiceless consonants, previous research has indicated that this is not 
the case. Maekawa & Kikuchi's results are in broad agreement with 
this research and show that such devoicing is not exceptionless in this 
environment and that its rate varies considerably according to the 
manner of the surrounding consonants. The authors also present their 
statistical findings for the phenomenon of consecutive devoicing, as 
well as for single devoicing in two atypical environments.

Kondo (pp. 229-245) investigates the duration and intensity of vowels 
in the standard devoicing environment between two voiceless 
consonants. Her experiment on duration shows that those vowels 
which become devoiced are also shorter than their voiced 
counterparts, the entire duration of the mora of which the vowel is part 
also being reduced. Furthermore, her experiment on intensity 
indicates that a vowel in a single devoicing environment which remains 
voiced has a lower intensity than a vowel in a non-devoicing 
environment: the same was not the case, however, for vowels in a 
consecutive devoicing environment. From this she concludes that 
devoiceable vowels are first reduced in length and intensity before 
being devoiced. Kondo also examines the syllable constraints on 
devoicing, in particular how desyllabification, demoraification and 
resyllabification may control which vowel is devoiced in cases of 
potential (but banned) triple consecutive devoicing.

Sugito (pp. 247-260) presents the results of acoustic and 
physiological experiments on the effects of speech rate on devoiced 
accented vowels in Osaka Japanese, whose accentual system is 
radically different from that of standard Tokyo Japanese and where 
vowels may be both devoiced and accented. In her acoustic 
experiments with bimoraic HL-accented lexemes, she shows that 
speech rate affects both vowel voicing and accentedness, with 
devoiceable accented vowels occurring more frequently devoiced in 
faster speech and, additionally, a tendency for the accentual pattern 
to be perceived as shifting from HL to HH in the fastest speech. The 
results of her physiological experiments suggest that this change in 
accentual pattern may be due to the short duration of the second 
vowel in the lexemes in question, whereby there was insufficient time 
for sternohyoid muscle activity and thus no F0 fall, the perceptual 
trigger for accentedness.

The final paper in the volume is that of Tanaka (pp. 261-278), who 
examines the interaction of voicing and accent, specifically the 
outcome of the 'in principle' incompatible situation of an accent-
bearing vowel being in a devoiceable position. This interaction is 
investigated through reconsidering it in the wider perspective of a 
general theory of prominence involving tone, length, sonority, accent 
and voicing. From this may be derived the phonological Harmonic 
Scale of Prominence which posits the order of prominence accent > 
tone > sonority > voicing and where, furthermore, an element always 
presupposes the existence of any element to its right (thus accent 
presupposes tone, sonority and voicing). After examining the 
interaction of accent with tone and of accent with sonority, the author 
proceeds to that of accent with voicing, where he views accent shift as 
a 'repair strategy for upholding harmonic completeness and 
prominence'. However, Tanaka claims to have solved the problems 
posed by the numerous examples of the accent not shifting and of the 
vowel being both devoiced and accented by resorting to the notions of 
sympathy and reranking within the Optimality Theory framework.

EVALUATION

This collection of papers deserves a slot on the bookshelf of any 
scholar of the Japanese language, particularly those whose research 
focuses more specifically on phonology or phonetics, or to a lesser 
extent the lexicon, orthographical history or automated speech 
recognition. Those with no background in Japanese but with a strong 
cross-linguistic interest in consonant voicing or vowel devoicing should 
also find much of interest in this volume. What is particularly beneficial 
about this collection is its undoubted usefulness as a portal for the 
reader who is unable to access or understand the vast mines of 
previous research material in Japanese on many of the subjects 
tackled. 

The editors deserve much credit for bringing together a stimulating 
and valuable selection of papers covering the many aspects of voicing 
in Japanese (rendaku; post-nasal voicing; the diachronic relationship 
between voicing and prenasalization in consonants; morphophonemic 
voicing; the orthographical representation of voicing; vowel devoicing 
and its relationship to accent, environment and intensity) from a wide 
range of theoretical (representational, Element Theory, Optimality 
Theory) and non-theoretical perspectives. Rendaku itself, with which 
half the papers in this volume concern themselves, is examined with 
reference to post-nasal voicing, inflected words, core-periphery 
vocabulary models and vocabulary strata, anthroponyms, accent, and 
laryngeal features. 

In a volume that is part of a generative grammar series it is perhaps 
unsurprising that the vast majority of papers deal with voicing from a 
synchronic perspective, with only the contributions from Ohno, 
Yamane-Tanaka and, to a certain extent, Takayama, offering the 
reader a diachronic take on voicing and its historical development. 
Since, as Blevins (2004: 3) has recently remarked, an 'essentially 
ahistorical perspective leads to considerable redundancy' 
because 'many patterns with a well-understood historical basis or 
origin must be re-encoded in synchronic accounts', the relevant 
dearth of diachronic analyses in this collection and its rather overly 
ahistorical perspective is perhaps somewhat regrettable. This is 
especially so with Part II of the volume, where, to the reviewer's 
knowledge, relatively little diachronic research has been published on 
the phenomenon of vowel devoicing and where the inclusion of a least 
one paper examining this from a historical perspective would have 
been useful.

Inevitably, in a volume with so many individual contributors, there are 
areas where more judicial editing would have been preferred. 
Although just under half of the papers are wonderfully free from any 
typos whatsoever, and most of the remainder have only a small 
number of minor errors, statistical discrepancies in tables and 
potentially serious typos in examples and maps lurk in the papers by 
Yamane-Tanaka and Maekawa & Kikuchi. A further two papers, those 
by Fukuzawa & Kitahara and Yamane-Tanaka, are clearly in need of 
native speaker editing. In the latter paper especially, the author's 
argument is occasionally difficult to follow due to some weak English 
and insufficient proofing. Yamane-Tanaka's paper also unfortunately 
suffers from at least six endnotes being incorrectly referenced, as well 
as the errors in tables and maps already pointed out above. This is a 
shame, since, for the reviewer, this paper was one of the most 
stimulating and original in the collection. On the more mundane level, 
the 58 endnotes in Ohno's 15-page (omitting appendices, 
acknowledgements and the endnotes themselves) paper is, by any 
standard, rather excessive: do we really need to be told in an endnote 
that 'lit.' is an abbreviation for 'literal translation'?

On balance, however, the rich and varied content this volume offers, 
as well as the stimulation and leads for further research it provides, 
more than outweigh the relatively minor gripes I have outlined in the 
previous two paragraphs. 

REFERENCES

Ito, Junko & Mester, Ralf-Armin (1995). Japanese Phonology. In John 
Goldsmith (ed.), Handbook of Phonological Theory, pp. 817-838, 
Blackwell, Cambridge.

Ito, Junko & Mester, Ralf-Armin (2001). Covert generalizations in 
Optimality Theory: the role of stratal faithfulness constraints. In 
Proceedings of 2001 International Conference on Phonology and 
Morphology, 3-33, Yongin, Korea.

Sugito, Miyoko (1965). Shibata-san to Imada-san: tango no 
chookakuteki benbetsu ni tsuite no ichi koosatsu, Gengo Seikatsu 
165: 64-72. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER


Mark Irwin is an associate professor at Yamagata University, Japan. 
His research interests include the historical phonology of Japanese, 
especially rendaku, gemination, Sino-Japanese and Japanese 
sinography.





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