Japanese apophonic compounds

Abstract

Abstract This paper provides a comprehensive description and analysis of Japanese apophonic compounds, such as ama-gasa (ame + kasa), ko-kage (ki + kage) or kamu-tikara (kami + tikara), in which the initial element exhibits one of three different pairs of final vowel alternations. The three pairs involved are e ∼ a, i ∼ o, and i ∼ u. To determine the controlling factors for apophony, its morphological function, its overall characteristics and its interaction with other compositional devices of Japanese (mainly rendaku) we constructed a database of 2,322 compounds. Each compound has as an element at least one of 22 “apophonic nouns” which may undergo vowel alternation when the initial element in a compound. The core results of this study are that there exists a range of morphological, lexical and phonological factors which tend to favour or disfavour apophony. The phonological factors mostly pertain to the length of either element in the compound. Further, it was also found that apophony is generally not linked, either positively (redundancy of morphological devices) or negatively (economy of morphological devices), to rendaku.