How productive is core-periphery structure in the Japanese lexicon?
Empirical results and theoretical implications
Jennifer L. SMITH | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In this talk, I review results from an experiment on nonce-loanword nativization in Japanesethat tests the productivity of core-periphery phonology (Smith & Tashiro 2019), and I discuss
implications of these results for phonological theory.
Japanese has lexical strata that are phonologically and morphologically distinct, the result of along history of language contact and lexical borrowing. The division of the lexicon into strata ispsychologically real, in that native speakers are sensitive to phonological differences between strata(Moreton & Amano 1999; Gelbart & Kawahara 2007; Tanaka & Fujita 2020). But how are thesedifferences represented in the phonological grammar?
Ito & Mester (1995ab, 1999) argue that the Japanese lexicon has a core-periphery structure: theNative stratum (core) is the least phonologically marked, and the Foreign stratum (peripheral) is themost marked, with the Sino-Japanese stratum intermediate. Ito & Mester propose that this coreperiphery structure is not just a historical accident, but is productive. That is, native speakers ofJapanese have distinct phonological grammars for the different strata, and crucially, these grammars
stand in a subset relation: in terms of Optimality Theory (OT), the most markedness constraints areenforced in Native forms, a smaller set is enforced in Sino-Japanese forms, and the fewest
markedness constraints are enforced in Foreign forms. While the actual situation is a little more
complex than this (Ito & Mester 1995ab; Kawahara, Nishimura, & Ono 2003), a fundamental claimof Ito & Mester’s proposal is that speakers of Japanese have a synchronic hierarchy of markedness
constraints, where higher-ranked constraints are enforced in all or most strata, but progressively
lower-ranked constraints are enforced only in strata nearer and nearer the core.
In Smith & Tashiro (2019), we report an experiment that tests the productivity of Ito & Mester’s
proposed markedness hierarchy and finds mixed results. Namely, some speakers show clearer
effects of a markedness hierarchy than others, and even for those speakers that have a hierarchy,
there are between-speaker differences in how the individual constraints are ordered. In this talk, Isummarize these results and discuss some implications for phonological theory, including thedebate between indexed faithfulness (Fukazawa, Kitahara, & Ota 1998; Ito & Mester 1999) andcophonologies (Inkelas & Zoll 2007) for modeling lexical strata in OT, and the debate between
weighted scalar constraints (Hsu & Jesney 2017, 2018) and cumulative effects of indexedconstraints (Smith 2018) for modeling lexical strata in Harmonic Grammar.
Selected References
Fukazawa, H, M Kitahara, & M Ota. 1998. Lexical stratification and ranking invariance inconstraint-based grammars. Chicago Linguistic Society 34(2): 47–62.
Gelbart, B, & S Kawahara. 2007. Lexical cues to foreignness in Japanese. FAJL 4: 49–60.
Hsu, B, & K Jesney. 2017. Loanword adaptation in Québec French: Evidence for weighted scalarconstraints. WCCFL 34: 249–258.
Hsu, B, & K Jesney. 2018. Weighted scalar constraints capture the typology of loanword
adaptation. Annual Meeting on Phonology 2017.
Inkelas, S, & C Zoll. 2007. Is grammar dependence real? Linguistics 45: 133–171.
Ito, J, & A Mester. 1999. The structure of the phonological lexicon. In N Tsujimura (ed.), The
Handbook of Japanese Linguistics, 62–100. Malden: Blackwell.
Kawahara, S, K Nishimura, & H Ono. 2003. Unveiling the unmarkedness of Sino-Japanese.
Japanese/Korean Linguistics 12: 140–151.
Moreton, E, & S Amano. 1999. Phonotactics in the perception of Japanese vowel length: Evidence
for long-distance dependencies. Proceedings of EuroSpeech 6; Budapest.
Smith, J. 2018. Stratified faithfulness in Harmonic Grammar and emergent core-periphery structure.
In R Bennett et al. (eds.), Hana-bana: A Festschrift for Junko Ito and Armin Mester, #13.
Smith, J, & Y Tashiro. 2019. Nonce-loan judgments and impossible-nativization effects inJapanese. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 4: #26.
Tanaka, Y, & Y Fujita. 2020. Phonological cues to Sino-Japanese words. Paper presented at the2020 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.