Abstract
The suffixal alternations of Japanese verbal inflection have been analyzed in at least four distinct ways in the literature. In this paper, working in the context of a general model of the inferential relation between synchrony and diachrony in inflectional morphophonology, I compute the predictions for potential change for three analyses of those alternations and show that only one set of predictions is consistent with the ongoing changes evident in a nationwide survey of inflection. I conclude that the analysis generating the correct predictions is the unique descriptively adequate analysis of the system of alternations in question. With regard to the explanatory principles governing the choice of that analysis from the set of observationally adequate alternatives, I show that the Japanese case counterexemplifies a wide range of proposals that have been made about the operation of morphophonological analysis and change and propose that the choice of both base forms and rules is due to a principle of Generalized Type Frequency. Among the general themes of the paper are the grammatical reality of language-specific phonological rules, the relevance of analogical processes to synchronic description and explanation, and the limited role played in morphophonological analysis by global considerations of predictability.
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Notes
In practice, shared segmental material (as opposed to subsegmental features) will normally be required to save a morpheme-specific alternation from suppletive status. For example, I will take the shared features [–high –low] (noted by a reviewer) of the two alternants -e and -ro of the Japanese Imperative suffix (see Table 3 below) to be coincidental rather than representing a significant generalization, with the result that the alternation is judged to be suppletive rather than morpholexical.
As noted by a reviewer, the major factor capable of confounding this expectation is high token frequency.
A number of the suffixes of Table 3 are like the Negative in displaying regional variation; for example, the V-stem Imperative suffix is -yo or -i in most of Western Japan. Variation in the Negative suffix is recorded in this and subsequent tables because the Western Japanese variant -an will figure prominently in the story of change in progress to be recounted below.
For C-stem alternants as basic, see de Chene (1985, 1987) for V-stem alternants as basic, see McCawley (1968, p. 93ff.); for longer alternants as basic, see, e.g., Kuroda (1960) or Chew (1973); for symmetrical listing, see Bloch (1946/1970, p. 24) (with environments specified) or Ito and Mester (2004) (with alternant choice determined by ranked constraints).
The alternative of a rule deleting the second of two vowels at verb stem boundary would account for the alternations of only two suffixes, the Infinitive and Negative (Categories 6,7), and would create zero V-stem suffix allomorphs not only in the Infinitive, but also in the Indicative and Imperative (as well as in the Potential, were that suffix to lose its restriction to C-stems).
It has been proposed (Labrune 2014) that all Japanese r are ultimately epenthetic, arising from insertion intervocalically in Proto-Japanese. Two problems this thesis must address are (1) as a sound change, an "excrescent" segment is plausible only insofar as it can be explained as an articulatory consequence (as in nr > ndr) or an auditory interpretation (as in ia > ija) of the transition between adjacent segments; (2) many Japanese r are widely taken (Martin 1966, Whitman 1985, Whitman 2012) to be cognate with Korean l, with even scholars who are skeptical of a genetic relationship between the two languages admitting "reliable" cognate candidates showing this correspondence (Vovin 2010:238).
While it is sometimes suggested (Hasegawa 1999, p. 63, Miyagawa 1999, p. 236) that deletion of the second of two successive consonants represents a general principle of Japanese phonology, the usual treatment of clusters is in fact assimilation of the first C to the second: /kar + ta/ ‘clip’ + Perfect → [katta], /kaw + ta/ ‘buy’ + Perfect → [katta], /but + sak-/ ‘beat + tear’ → [bussak-] ‘tear violently’, /hik + sage-/ ‘draw + hang’ → [hissag-] ‘carry’; /it + kai/ ‘one + time’ → [ikkai], /it + sai/ ‘one + year of age’ → [issai], /it + pai/ ‘one + glass’ → [ippai].
Ryukyu varieties, typically grouped into five languages (Amami, Okinawan, Miyako, Yaeyama, Yonaguni) but divided by Grimes (2000, pp. 649–650) into eleven, are by no means irrelevant to our topic, but their divergence from each other and from mainland Japanese puts them outside the scope of the present paper.
It goes without saying that, as a reviewer notes, sociolinguistic research documenting in detail the course of ongoing change is also extremely important. Of the six "innovative r-suffixes" of Tables 6 and 7 below, such research is most plentiful for Potential -re- in Tokyo (see, e.g., Matsuda 1993 and references cited there) but can be observed to some extent for other suffixes as well (see, e.g., Jinnouchi 1996, pp. 56–57 on Negative -ran in Hakata (Fukuoka city)).
The innovative Negative suffix occurs only in the Western Japanese form -ran; this is perhaps because speakers with irregular Eastern -na- identify it with the homophonous negative existential adjective, an identification that would be rendered impossible by innovative *-rana- .
Apart from irregular su- and ku- (Sect. 2.1) and verbs that vary by region between C-stem and V-stem inflection, the V-stem survey items, by category, are (4) ne-, oki- ‘arise’, ake- ‘open (tr.)’; (5) ake-; (6) mi-; (7) mi-, ne-, oki-, ake-; (8) mi-, oki-, ake-; (9) oki-, ki- (4 items).
By category number, the two figures in question are as follows (NR = non-responding, BL = base lacking, DC = distinct construction): Cat 4: NR 1, BL 260 (Map 109); Cat 5: NR 19, BL 0; Cat 6: NR 55, DC 207; Cat 7: NR 1, BL 27 (Map 80); Cat 8: NR 8, DC 11; Cat 9: NR 9, BL 150 (Maps 173–174, 181–183) [one location in both sets].
The location-by-location tabulation of GAJ data that underlies the figures of Table 7 is available from the author on request.
Two points showing miyan do not belong to this set of 22 because they have -ran for a V-stem other than mi- (okiran at 750472, neran at 833350); three points of the 22 do not show miyan, their -yan being restricted to V-stems other than mi- (neyan at 750046 and 750391, neyan and akeyan at 658735). The 19 points that the two sets share are 654612, 655476, 655506, 656387, 656423, 656514, 656673, 657332, 657379, 657543, 657685, 658088, 658438, 659044, 659147, 659501, 750408, 751369, 924994.
Points 469792, 562484, 563227; 653922, 654853, 655824, 662070; 722975, 732095, 737096.
Perhaps the clearest prediction of Analyses B and C, common to the two analyses, is for C-stem Imperatives in -o. The GAJ has no C-stem Imperative survey items, reflecting a paucity of interesting variation for this category nationwide, but unpublished results of the preparatory survey for the GAJ do show a handful of apparent C-stem Imperatives in -o from the vicinity of Kanazawa city, Ishikawa Prefecture. Such forms, however, recorded in the dialectological literature with -oo as well as -o (Tojo et al. 1961, vol. 3, p. 100, Iwai 1959, p. 100ff.), are in origin imperative uses of Hortatives (thanks to Takuichiro Onishi for clarification on this point).
The word is absent from the first edition of Daizirin (Matsumura et al. 1988) and the fourth edition of Koozien (Shinmura 1991), two standard dictionaries, but present in the second edition of the former (Matsumura 1995) and the fifth edition of the latter (Shinmura 1998). Its origin, then, can be dated quite precisely.
de Lacy (2006, pp. 81–82), citing Mester and Ito (1989) and Lombardi (1998) (both of which refer to de Chene 1985), includes Japanese r-Epenthesis on a list of cases for which “Epenthesis is … forced by some general prosodic requirement….” As the above discussion makes clear, r-Epenthesis in fact has a far more restricted range of application than is consistent with de Lacy's claim.
Klafehn (2003, p. vii) presents two main reasons for concluding that inflected forms are atomic, namely that native speakers perform poorly on nonce word verb inflection tasks ("wug-testing") and that he finds no default error pattern in a database (130 h) of child conversation (three children aged 18–36 months). I submit that the innovative r-suffixes documented in Sect. 2.3 above constitute the relevant "default error pattern" in Japanese verb inflection and that, given the evidence they provide regarding the analysis of the system that is in force, an analysis that presupposes word-internal segmentation, the wug-testing reported must be judged to have failed to tap into linguistic competence.
The relative lexical frequency of the eleven occurring stem-final segments is approximately as follows: e (29.6 %), i (3.0 %), r (22.1 %), s (17.4 %), k (8.4 %), m (8.2 %), w (6.6 %), t (2.2 %), g (1.6 %), b (0.8 %), n (0.02 %). These figures are based on searches of Nishio et al. (2000) and exclude irregular verbs (see below). (The .2 % discrepancy between the C-stem total of 67.3 % that these results yield and the value of 67.5 % reported above is the result of (a) rounding and (b) a shortfall of two C-stems in the stem-specific search results.)
The fact that leveling in labial and dorsal stems is a consequence of the same quantitative criterion that dictates extension of the t ~s alternation for coronals means that no condition mandating uniform paradigms (see, e.g., the papers in Downing et al. 2005) will be necessary to explain the leveling in question. See Garrett (2008) for the proposal that, consistent with the Korean case, leveling is merely a subtype of extension.
While Eastern Japanese V-stem Imperative -ro begins with r, I omit the Imperative from the set of suffixes whose alternations support postulation of r-Epenthesis because there is no independent evidence for -ro's segmentability; the fact that -ro is lacking in many localities that nevertheless display clear evidence for r-Epenthesis shows that in any case it is not necessary for postulation of that rule. I further assume that the restriction of the Potential suffix to C-stems (in conservative dialects), by precluding that suffix from having any V-stem alternant at all, excludes it from the set to which candidate alternations could in principle apply.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank audiences at the First International Spring Forum of the English Linguistic Society of Japan (Tokyo, April 2008) and the Sixth Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (Nagoya, September 2009), where portions of the above material were presented. I would also like to express my appreciation to the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) and to Takuichiro Onishi in particular for allowing me to view unpublished results of the preparatory survey for the Grammar Atlas of Japanese Dialects and for helpful correspondence on related matters. I am also grateful to NINJAL for permission to use the Chunagon corpus search tool and to Kikuo Maekawa for guidance in this regard. For relevant discussion, I thank Masae Matsuki and Takayuki Ikezawa. Finally, I am greatly indebted to the editors of JEAL and to reviewers for two journals for comments that have led to many improvements and clarifications; remaining errors are my responsibility. Preliminary and abbreviated versions of parts of this material have appeared as de Chene 2009 and 2010b; a longer version was posted online as de Chene 2010a.
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de Chene, B. Description and explanation in morphophonology: the case of Japanese verb inflection. J East Asian Linguist 25, 37–80 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-015-9137-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-015-9137-y