Abstract
The aim of this study is to understand how /r/ emerged and developed in Proto-Japanese and how the conditions of its emergence shed light on its present phonological behavior. The paper first offers a review of the phonetic, phonological, and morpho-phonological characteristics of /r/ in Japanese through examination of a large array of empirical evidence. The picture that emerges is that of an unmarked, phonologically empty segment, confirming a number of previous studies, in particular that by Mester and Itô (Language 65:258–293, 1989). I argue that /r/ primarily developed in Japanese as a default epenthetic consonant in the intervocalic position within the morphological domain of a stem and its affixes, through an ‘emergence of the unmarked’ mechanism before becoming a fully contrastive phoneme later on by virtue of a phonologization process. A formal account of this proposal within the framework of Optimality Theory is offered. It is shown that the phonological content of /r/ is acquired due to the application of well-formedness constraints (Onset, Align, MaxIO, DepIO) as well as that of two sets of markedness constraints (Featural Agreement and Harmony Scale), which ensure that the null input is mapped to the least marked output in terms of phonological features.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baković, Eric. 2000. Harmony, dominance and control. Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University.
Beckman, Jill N. 1999. Positional faithfulness: An Optimality Theoretic treatment of phonological asymmetries [Outstanding dissertations in linguistics]. New York and London: Garland.
Clements, Nick, and Elizabeth Hume. 1995. The internal organization of speech sounds. In The handbook of phonological theory, ed. John Goldsmith, 245–306. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Chene, Brent. 1985. R-epenthesis and the Japanese verb. Papers in Japanese Linguistics 10: 170–207.
Delafosse, Maurice. 1955. La langue mandingue et ses dialectes (2 vols.). Paris: Paul Geuthner.
Frellesvig, Bjarke. 2008. On reconstruction of Proto-Japanese and Pre-Old Japanese verb inflection. In Proto-Japanese, issues and prospects (Current issues in linguistic theory 294), ed. Bjarke Frellesvig, and John Whitman, 175–192. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fujioka, Katsuji. 1908. Nihongo no chii. Kokugakuin Zasshi 14: 988–997.
Giegerich, Heinz J. 1999. Lexical strata in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldsmith, John. 1976/1979. Autosegmental phonology. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club (published 1979, Garland Press).
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Language universals. The Hague: Mouton.
Hamano, Shoko. 1998/1986. The sound symbolic system of Japanese. Tokyo: Kuroshio.
Hattori, Shirô. 1960. Gengogaku no hôhô [Methods in linguistics]. Tokyo: Iwanami.
Hayden, Rebecca E. 1950. The relative frequency of phonemes in General American English. Word 6–3: 217–223.
Houis, Maurice. 1963. Etude descriptive de la langue susu (Mémoires de l’Institut Français d’Afrique Noire). Dakar: IFAN.
Humbert, Helga. 1996. De Kameleontische aard van de Groningse /r/ verklaard vanuit representationeel perspectief [An account of the chameleonic nature of Groningse /r/ from a representational perspective]. Taal en Tongval 48(2): 139–162.
Irie, Sayaka. 1996. Gendai Nihongo ni okeru wago sanhaku meishi ni tsuite [About three-mora native words in Modern Japanese]. Dôshisha Kokubungaku 43: 97–108.
Itô, Junko, and Armin Mester. 2003. Japanese morphophonemics. Markedness and word structure. (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 41). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Kager, René. 1999. Optimality theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kawahara, Shigeto, Hajime Ono, and Kiyoshi Sudo. 2006. Consonant cooccurrence restrictions in Yamato Japanese. In Japanese/Korean linguistics 14, ed. Timothy Vance, and Kimberly Jones, 27–38. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Kishida, Takeo. 1984. Kokugo on’in henka no kenkyû [Research on phonological changes in Japanese]. Tokyo: Musashino Shoin.
Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyûjo [National Center for Research on the Japanese Language]. 1984. Nihongo no Goi to Kyôiku [Research and teaching in Japanese lexicology]. Tokyo: Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyûjo Publications.
Komatsu, Hideo. 1981. Nihongo no on’in (Nihongo no sekai n° 7) [The phonology of Japanese (The world of Japanese n° 7)]. Tokyo: Chûô Kôronsha.
Kuginuki, Tooru. 1982. Jôdai Nihongo ra-gyôon-kô [Remarks on r in Archaic Japanese]. Toyama Daigaku Jinbungakubu Kiyô 6: 192–206.
Kurematsu, Akira. 1997. Intsu jôhô no jôhô kagaku he no tekiyô [How intonational information contributes to information science]. In Nihongo Onsei (2), akusento, intonêshon, rizumu to pôzu [Japanese phonetics (2), accent, intonation, rhythm and pause], ed. Miyoko Sugito, 303–318. Tokyo: Sanseidô.
Kurisu, Kazutaka. 2009. Palatalisability via feature compatibility. Phonology 26(3): 437–475.
Labrune, Laurence. 1996. La formation des désinences verbales en japonais ancien. Cipango 5: 141–171.
Labrune, Laurence. 1997. Inertie phonologique, absence de marque et sous-spécification: La consonne r en japonais. In Absence de marque et représentation de l’absence, Travaux linguistiques du cerlico 10, ed. Gérard Deléchelle and Marc Fryd, 245–267. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Labrune, Laurence. 1998. De l’iconicité en japonais: Suffixes en r + voyelle et réduplication. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 27(1): 79–118.
Labrune, Laurence. 2012. The phonology of Japanese (The phonology of the world’s languages). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Labrune, Laurence. In preparation. Word-initial liquid prohibition: A typological survey. Ms., University of Bordeaux 3.
Lawrence, Wayne. 2000. Shiin wo koete okoru boin no yûgô – Ryûkyû hôgen ni okeru genshô wo chûshin ni [Vowel coalescence across consonants: The phenomenon in Ryukyuan dialects]. Onsei Kenkyû (Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan) 4(1): 55–60.
Lindau, Mona. 1985. The story of /r/. In Phonetic linguistics: Essays in honor of Peter Ladefoged, ed. Victoria Fromkin, 157–168. Orlando: Academic Press.
Martin, Samuel. 1987. The Japanese language through time. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Matsuno, Kazuhiko. 1971. Some allophones of Japanese /r/ and their stylistic values. Onseigakkai Kaihô 136: 5–8.
McCarthy, John, and Alan Prince. 1993. Generalized alignment. In Yearbook of morphology, 79–153. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
McCarthy, John, and Alan Prince. 1994. The emergence of the unmarked: Optimality in prosodic morphology. In Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 24: 333–379. Amherst: GLSA.
McCarthy, John, and Alan Prince. 1995. Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. In University of Massachusetts occasional papers in linguistics 18, ed. Jill Beckman, et al., 249–384. Amherst: GLSA.
McCawley, James. 1968. The phonological component of a grammar of Japanese. The Hague: Mouton.
Mester, Armin, and Junko Itô. 1989. Feature predictability and underspecification: Palatal prosody in Japanese mimetics. Language 65: 258–293.
Miyake, Marc Hideo. 2003. Old Japanese: A phonetic reconstruction. London and New York: Routledge Curzon.
Nasukawa, Kuniya, and Phillip Backley. 2011. The internal structure of ‘r’ in Japanese. Phonological Studies 14: 27–34.
Ohnishi, Masayuki. 1987. Dôteki jinkô kôgai ni yoru nihongo shiin no kôsatsu [A study of Japanese consonants by means of an artificial palate]. Onsei Gakkai Kaihô 186: 19–24.
Ohno, Susumu. 1953. Nihongo no dôshi no katsuyôkei no kigen ni tsuite [On the origin of the Japanese verb conjugations]. Kokugo to Kokubungaku 30(6): 47–56.
Paradis, Carole, and Jean-François Prunet (eds.). 1991. The special status of coronals: Internal and external evidence. San Diego: Academic Press.
Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. 1993/2004. Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Technical report, Rutgers University and University of Colorado at Boulder, 1993. Revised version published by Blackwell, 2004.
Proctor, Michael Ian. 2009. Gestural characterization of a phonological class: The liquids. Ph.D. dissertation. Yale University.
Rivierre, Jean-Claude. 1973. Phonologie comparée des dialectes de l’extrême sud de la Nouvelle Calédonie. Paris: Selaf.
Sagisaka, Yoshinori, and Yoh’ichi Tohkura. 1984. Phoneme duration control for speech synthesis by rule. Transactions of the Institute of Electronics and Communication J67-A: 629–636.
Sakakura, Atsuyoshi. 1966. Gokôsei no Kenkyû [Research on word formation]. Tokyo: Kadokawa.
Schourup, Lawrence, and Ikuhiro Tamori. 1992. Japanese palatalization in relation to theories of restricted underspecification. Gengo Kenkyû 101: 107–145.
Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990. The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tsuzuki, Masaki, and Hyun-Bok Lee. 1992. A phonetic study of the Korean and Japanese lateral, flap and nasal. In Proceedings of the 1992 Seoul international conference on linguistics, ed. The Linguistic Society of Korea, 761–780. Seoul: Koryo University.
Ueda, Isao, and Stuart Davis. 2001. The acquisition of Japanese r. Gengo Kenkyû 119: 111–139.
Uffmann, Christian. 2007. Intrusive [r] and optimal epenthetic consonants. Language Sciences 29: 451–476.
Unger, James M. 1977. Studies in Early Japanese morphophonemics. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.
van Hout, Roeland, and Hans van de Velde. 2001. Patterns of /r/ variation. In r-atics: Sociolinguistic, phonetic and phonological characteristics of /r/ (Etudes et travaux n° 4), ed. Roeland van Hout, and Hans van de Velde, 1–9. Brussels: Institut des Langues Vivantes et de Phonétique.
van Oostendorp, Marc. 2001. The phonology of postvocalic /r/ in Brabant Dutch and Limburg Dutch. In r-atics: Sociolinguistic, phonetic and phonological characteristics of /r/ (Etudes et travaux n° 4), ed. Roeland van Hout, and Hans van de Velde, 113–122. Brussels: Institut des Langues Vivantes et de Phonétique.
Walsh-Dickey, Laura. 1997. The phonology of liquids. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachussets at Amherst.
Wenck, Günther. 1966. The phonemics of Japanese: Questions and attempts. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Whitman, John. 2008. The source of the bigrade conjugation and stem shape in Pre-Old Japanese. In Proto-Japanese: Issues and prospects (Currents issues in linguistic theory 294), ed. Bjarke Frellesvig, and John Whitman, 159–173. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wiese, Richard. 2001. The unity and variation of German /r/. In r-atics: Sociolinguistic, phonetic and phonological characteristics of /r/ (Etudes et travaux n° 4), ed. Roeland van Hout, and Hans van de Velde, 11–26. Brussels: Institut des Langues Vivantes et de Phonétique.
Wioland, François. 1991. Les sons du français. Paris: Hachette.
Yamaguchi, Yoshinori. 1985. Kodai nihongo bunpô no seiritsu no kenkyû [Research on the development of Archaic Japanese grammar]. Tokyo: Yûseidô.
Yoshida, Kanehiko. 1976. Nihongo gogengaku no Hôhô. Tokyo: Taishûkan.
Yu, Chae-Weon. 1985. Uri mal yeoksun sajeon [Reverse dictionary of Korean]. Seoul: Jeongeumsa.
Zipf, George Kinsley, and Francis Millet Rogers. 1939. Phonemes and variphones in four present-day romance languages and classical Latin from the point of view of dynamic philology. Archives Néerlandaises de Phonétique Expérimentale 15: 111–147.