Testing OCP-labial effect on Japanese rendaku
Gakuji Kumagai
January 2020 

Japanese rendaku is a morphophonological phenomenon in which a morpheme-initial voiceless obstruent becomes voiced when it is the non-initial member of a compound. There are a number of factors that inhibit rendaku. A well-known factor is a voiced obstruent: rendaku does not apply if the second member of a compound already contains a voiced obstruent (i.e. Lyman’s Law, or OCP (-son, voice)). There is another OCP-related factor that blocks rendaku: although /h/ usually becomes labial [b] when rendaku applies (e.g. hako ‘box’ + hune ‘ship’ → hakobune ‘ark’), the rendaku application of /h/ is blocked if the following consonant is labial [m] (e.g. suna ‘sand’ + hama ‘beach’ → sunahama ‘sand beach’/*sunabama). One hypothesis regarding this rendaku blocking is that, if /h/ became labial [b], it would yield a sequence of homorganic consonants [b…m], which would violate a putative OCP-labial effect. However, it is unclear whether this is the true reason for the rendaku blocking, as there are only a few words in which /h/ is followed by other labial consonants, such as [ɸ]. The first aim of the current study is to examine whether the rendaku restriction applies productively to nonce words that contain labial consonants. The second aim is to examine whether the OCP-labial effect applies to words that contain the glide /w/ as well as other labial consonants, as some scholars describe it as a labial while others describe it as a velar. The results show that 1) the OCP-labial effect can be generalised in rendaku; 2) it works locally rather than non-locally; 3) its applicability is gradient according to the following consonant in the onset position; 4) the glide /w/ did not participate in the effect, suggesting the possibility that its place of articulation is phonologically non-labial.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003290 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Ms
keywords:	japanese; rendaku; the ocp-labial effect; phonology
previous versions:	v3 [November 2017] v2 [May 2017] v1 [January 2017]
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