According to Imae (1960, cited in Hayashi O., 1982), /N/ and /Q/ respectively account for 4.7% and 2.3% of all Japanese moras in textual (token)
frequency. This source does not provide any data for /R/.
Notes:
(1) For instance, Hattori Shirô (1960, and other papers) does not need the unit /R/ because he posits a zero consonant /’/ which enables him to distinguish satooya° ‘foster parent’ from satouya ‘sugar seller’, which he transcribes respectively as sato’oya and satooya. In the transcription adopted in this book, these two forms are transcribed as sato-oya° /satooya/
and satou-ya /satoRya/. The former has two full o’s which follow each other, the latter has a long o (see section 2.7.3 for a discussion on the representational difference between the two entities).
(2) In Pre-modern Japanese, the process known as renjô (## ‘liaison’) sometimes occurs in this type of context. Some vestiges of this remain in the modern language, but they are totally lexicalized, like tennou ‘emperor’
from ten /teN/ ‘heaven’ and ou /oR/ ‘king’, rather than ten’ou as one would expect. See Vance (1987:164ff.) for a presentation of this phenomenon.
(3) This process is known as onbin (## ‘sound change’) only when it applies to Yamato words.
(4) The only exception in Standard Modern Japanese is the interjection un
‘uh huh’, realized as [⥁̃ɯː]. One can also mention the marginal, obsolete realizations [m#me] for ume° ‘plum’, and other words beginning with u + nasal (see section 3.8).
The Phonology of Japanese
Laurence Labrune
Print publication date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780199545834
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May-12 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.001.0001
Prosodic units Laurence Labrune
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199545834.003.0006
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter is devoted to the prosodic units of Japanese, the mora, the syllable, the foot, the prosodic word, and the prosodic hierarchy. It reviews the evidence demonstrating the central role played by the mora in Japanese phonology. It then proceeds to a re-examination of the status of the syllable, which has been argued in a number of recent works to be an indispensable prosodic unit, alongside the mora and the foot, although it has been absent from the work of most native Japanese phonologists who have always been content with the mora. Taking as a basis the author’s extensive research on the subject, this chapter argues that the syllable is not a relevant unit in the phonology of Japanese, and it shows how all the phenomena which have been inputed to the action of the syllable can be accounted for with exclusive reference to the mora and the foot.
Keywords: mora, syllable, foot, prosodic word, prosodic hierarchy
This chapter is devoted to the prosodic units of Japanese, the mora, the syllable, the foot, the prosodic word, and the other upper units.
Whereas there is no doubt about the relevance of the mora, the foot, and the prosodic word in Japanese phonology, things are much less clear with regard to the syllable in the most usual sense of the term, i.e. a prosodic constituent which can be structurally light (two-slot syllables, like ka) or heavy (three-slot syllables, like kan,kou [koː], or kai). The claim I would like to put forward in this chapter is that the syllable actually plays no relevant role in Tôkyô Japanese and that this language is a mora-counting mora language, thus
rehabilitating the Japanese native linguistic tradition which has long been satisfied with what corresponds to the mora for the analysis of the various prosodic phenomena of the language. However, it should not be forgotten that some dialects of Japanese such as the Aomori or Akita dialects (north of Honshû) or the Kagoshima dialect (south of Kyûshû) are indisputably syllabic and held as such by the proponents of a moraic analysis of Tôkyô Japanese, while others, for instance the Kyôto/Ôsaka dialect or the Izu dialect (south of Tôkyô) are clearly moraic and held as such even by the advocates of a syllabic analysis of Tôkyô Japanese. Japanese phonologists generally operate a distinction between ‘mora dialects’ (haku hôgen ###) and ‘non-mora dialects’, i.e. syllable-based dialects (hi-haku hôgen ####, see for instance Hirayama et al., 1993, Satô R., 2002). Actually, it is mainly Tôkyô Japanese that poses a problem with regard to its classification as a mora or syllable dialect, being analysed either as only moraic, or as syllabic with moras acting as subconstituents of syllables.
In section 6.1, we shall review the evidence demonstrating the central role played by the mora in Japanese phonology. Section 6.2 critically reassesses the role and relevance of the syllable in the standard language, through a review of the scholarship and reexamination of the alleged evidence in favour of the syllabic approach. It will be shown that the relevance of a light/
heavy syllabic distinction is extremely difficult to justify on the basis of the language’s internal evidence. All the phenomena which have been imputed to the action of the syllable in Tôkyô Japanese can be accounted for by exclusive reference to the mora and to the foot. In section 6.3, I present a model of the basic prosodic unit (prosodeme) of Japanese that does not rely on the syllable, in keeping with the (p. 143 ) traditional Japanese approach.
Instead, two different types of prosodemes (= moras) are distinguished:
regular CV prosodemes and weak, or deficient, prosodemes, which lack one of the two components V or C. Section 6.4 is dedicated to the foot. We will see that Japanese feet obey a structural constraint that stipulates that they start with a regular mora. Section 6.5 introduces the other upper levels of the Japanese prosodic hierarchy, and section 6.6 offers a conclusion and summary.