A Cross-Linguistic Analysis on the Phonological Structure of Compounds

本研究的目的是对复合名词进行跨语言分析，并阐明日语和英语复合名词在语音结构方面的普遍性和语言特殊性。本研究揭示了以下四点。1)音节是日语中不可缺少的语音描述单位。把这个单元引入到日语的描述中，可以让我们澄清日语和英语复合词在语音结构上的一些关键的相似之处。在很大程度上可以预测复合名词的哪个词素在音系上变得突出。在这种概括中，词头和修饰语之间的形态区别起着至关重要的作用。3)基于语音特征的分析使我们能够概括日语中的一些元音合并过程，包括那些影响重复复合词的过程。4)复合重音规则和其他重音规则以一些特殊的方式相互作用，如元音增音和辅音省略。在包括东京日语和鹿儿岛日语在内的许多语言中，共时重音规则适用于在历史进程中发生的音段变化的输入，而不是输出。

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.