Abstract
High vowels in Japanese devoice between two voiceless consonants; recent work has shown that devoiced /u/ in this environment is also variably deleted. This paper investigates the syllabification of consonant clusters resulting from vowel deletion. We consider two competing hypotheses from the literature: (H1) that consonant clusters are parsed tautosyllabically into a complex syllable onset and (H2) that consonant clusters are parsed heterosyllabically, with the consonant preceding the deleted vowel becoming a syllabic consonant. We bring both phonological and phonetic evidence bear on evaluating these hypotheses. The phonological evidence draws on patterns sensitive to syllable structure including pitch accent placement, loanword truncation, hypocoristic formation, and mimetics. The phonetic evidence comes from patterns of temporal stability in articulatory data collected with ElectroMagnetic Articulography. Both types of evidence provide converging support for H2.
Highlights
Japanese is well-known as a language without consonant clusters, allowing only homorganic nasalconsonant clusters and geminates (e.g., Ito, 1986)
The flanking consonants appear to be timed directly to each other instead of to an intervening vowel, i.e., consonant-to-vowel (C-V) coordination, providing further evidence that there is no vowel in the surface representation of these tokens. These results mean that Japanese, as a consequence of high vowel deletion, has consonant clusters (e.g. [ɸsoku]), contrary to the “CV-language” characterization often given to Japanese
The first is a phonological consideration; we show that phonological processes that are sensitive to syllable structure, such as prosodic truncation and pitch accent placement, are unaltered by high vowel deletion
Summary
Japanese is well-known as a language without consonant clusters, allowing only homorganic nasalconsonant clusters and geminates (e.g., Ito, 1986). A recent articulatory study by Shaw and Kawahara (2018) used ElectroMagnetic Articulography (EMA) to address this issue—mere devoicing vs wholesale deletion—by examining whether the devoiced vowels retain their lingual articulation They found that at least some devoiced tokens lack vowel height targets altogether, suggesting that these high vowels are not merely devoiced. The flanking consonants appear to be timed directly to each other instead of to an intervening vowel, i.e., consonant-to-vowel (C-V) coordination, providing further evidence that there is no vowel in the surface representation of these tokens These results mean that Japanese, as a consequence of high vowel deletion, has consonant clusters [ɸsoku]), contrary to the “CV-language” characterization often given to Japanese Based on this recent result reported in Shaw and Kawahara (2018), this paper addresses how such consonant clusters, arising from high vowel deletion, are syllabified. The convergence of the phonetic and phonological evidence bolsters the claim that syllable structure corresponds to characteristic patterns of gestural timing in in speech
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