2000 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Studies on Japanese Phonology in Optimality Theory
| Project/Area Number |
10044010
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B).
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
言語学・音声学
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| Research Institution | KOBE UNIVERSITY |
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Principal Investigator |
KUBOZONO Haruo Kobe University, Faculty of Letters, Associate Professor, 文学部, 助教授 (80153328)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
HARAGUCHI Shosuke Meikai University, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Professor, 外国語学部, 教授 (50101316)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1998 – 2000
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| Keywords | Phonology / Optimality Theory / Japanese / accent / syllable / mora / lexicon / compound noun |
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| Research Abstract |
In this research project, we studied the plonological structure of Japanese in the framework of Optimality Theory, a constaint-based linguistic theory. Our main focus was on the following four topics : accent, word order and plonological structure, syllable structure of words, and the structure of the lexicon.
Our analysis of Japanese accent has revealed that epenthetic vowels behave as if they were absent and elided consonants behave as if they were present in some accent rules. This behavior of epenthetic vowels and elided consonants is difficult to explain in the constraint-based Optimality Theory, where grammaticality is defined as well-formedness on output structure.
Research on the relationship between word order and phonological structure has revealed the following three points. First, what constitutes a semantic head in compound nouns tends to be phonologically subordinated to the semantic *on-head, or modifier. This seems to account for the compound accent patterns of many languages as well as the behavior of toneless syllables in tone languages. Second, the same principle seems to govern the compound truncation process in Japanese, where the semantic head tends to be omitted. Third, there are cases where [head+modifier] compound nouns exhibit an irregular phrasing pattern as opposed to [modifier+head] compounds, which exhibit a regular phrasing pattern.
Our analysis of syllable structure has revealed that Japanese bisyllabic words display preference towards heavy-light structure as against light-heavy structure. This asymmetry in syllabic organization seems to appear in a variety of phenomena in Japanese.
Finally, our analysis of the lexicon shows that different phonological patterns exhibited by different lexical strata can be properly accounted for in the framework of Optimality Theory, in terms of universal constraints and their minimal rerankings.
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Research Products
(12 results)
