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In:Usage-based Approaches to Japanese Grammar: Towards the understanding of human language
Edited by Kaori Kabata and Tsuyoshi Ono
[Studies in Language Companion Series 156] 2014
► pp. 137–152

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If rendaku isn’t a rule, what in the world is it?

Published online: 10 June 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.156.11van
The morphophonemic voicing phenomenon in Japanese known as rendaku is highly irregular, but several factors are believed to make rendaku more or less likely. This paper reviews some experiments intended to test the psychological reality of three such factors: Lyman’s Law, the semantic relationship between the two elements in noun + verb compound nouns, and salient semantic or phonological resemblances between novel compounds and existing compounds. The evidence suggests that each of these factors has at least a detectable effect on responses in experimental situations. Any realistic overall account of rendaku will have to incorporate a significant degree of intractable irregularity, but it will also have to be consistent with the intuition of naïve native speakers that rendaku is predictable.
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Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Fukasawa, Michiko
2025. When syntax and semantics of compounds matter to voicing alternations: an experimental investigation of effects of grammatical relation on rendaku. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 41:2 ► pp. 239 ff. DOI logo
Kawahara, Shigeto & Gakuji Kumagai
2023. Lyman’s Law can count only up to two. Laboratory Phonology 14:1 DOI logo
Kawahara, Shigeto & Gakuji Kumagai
2024. The non-local nature of Lyman’s Law revisited. Laboratory Phonology 15:1 DOI logo
Tanaka, Yu
2023. Learning biases in proper nouns. Phonology 40:1-2 ► pp. 155 ff. DOI logo
Kawahara, Shigeto
2015. Can we use rendaku for phonological argumentation?. Linguistics Vanguard 1:1 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2016. Sequential Voicing in Japanese [Studies in Language Companion Series, 176], DOI logo

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