A Cross-Linguistic Analysis on the Phonological Structure of Compounds

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The aim of this research was to make a cross-linguistic analysis of compound nouns and to illuminate the universal and language-specific aspects of Japanese and English compounds with respect to their phonological structures. This research has revealed the following four points.1)The syllable is an indispensable unit of phonological description in Japanese. Introducing this unit into the description of Japanese allows us to clarify some crucial similarities that underly the phonological structures of Japanese and English compounds.2)It is possible to predict to a large extent which element of compound nouns becomes phonologically prominent. The morphological distinction between the head and the modifier plays a crucial role in this generalization.3)An analysis based on phonetic features enables us to generalize a number of vowel coalescence processes in Japanese, including those that affect reduplicative compounds.4)Compound accent rules and other accent rules interact in some peculiar ways with segmental changes such as vowel epenthesis and consonant elision. In many languages including Tokyo Japanese and Kagoshima Japanese, synchronic accent rules apply to the input, not the output, of segmental changes that happened in the course of the history.