<OT> New Posting: ROA-750

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 750-0605

Consonant co-occurrence restrictions in Yamato Japanese

Shigeto Kawahara <kawahara at linguist.umass.edu>
Hajime Ono <hajime at umd.edu>
Kiyoshi Sudo <kiyosudo at hotmail.com>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=750


Abstract:
In many languages there is a tendency for similar consonants,
especially those that share place features, not to co-occur
within a certain morphological domain (e.g. stem). This
paper shows that the same tendency is observed in the native
(Yamato) vocabulary of Japanese. We extracted monomorphemic
Yamato words from the Koojien dictionary (Niinuma et al
1998). The result of our analysis suggests that pairs of
consonants from the same identity class, defined mainly
in terms of place of articulation, are all underrepresented
to a statistically significant degree. Several aspects of
previously unnoticed restrictions are discussed.

Comments: To appear in Japanese/Korean Linguistics 14
Keywords: OCP, similarity, gradient phonotactics
Areas: Phonology
Type: Conference Proceedings Chapter

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=750