Phonological Rules of Present-day Japanese in Sign-language Dictionaries

Abstract

In order to find phonological rules of present-day Japanese, configurational patterns of the string of vowels in a word are analysed statistically. As samples of the lexicon, we take notice of the sign language into which words necessary for our dairy life would be condensed. Through analyses being made for the disyllabic as well as the trisyllabic words, it is shown that the way of selecting the vowel patterns is dependent significantly on the number of syllables. In the former, the configurations of vowels are shown to be determined stochastically, while in the latter, it is found that symmetry is broken and the words have a preference for a certain configuration. Specifically, native words exhibit a tendency to choose an identical vowel between syllables adjoining each other, which results in a feature like the vowel harmony. In sharp contrast to this, for loan words, irrespective of their origins, one finds the avoidance for the duplication of an identical vowel between neighbouring syllables. Configurations of the long and the short sounds are also analysed. It is concluded that the trisyllabic words have a preference for a prolonged sound on the beginning, though for the disyllabic words its position obeys a stochastic law. The results are discussed in comparison with those obtained for European as well as other East-Asian languages.