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Japanese mimetic palatalisation revisited: implications for conflicting directionality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2009

John Alderete  and
Alexei Kochetov
John Alderete
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
Alexei Kochetov
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

This article re-examines ‘conflicting directionality’ in Japanese mimetic words, a distributional pattern in which palatalisation is preferentially realised on the rightmost of two coronal consonants, but on the leftmost consonant in a word without coronals. Analysis of the original dictionary evidence given in support of this generalisation and an exhaustive search of the Japanese mimetic stratum reveal both several counterexamples to conflicting directionality and the fact that the datasets are far too small to support linguistic generalisation. The theoretical assumptions employed to account for Japanese mimetic palatalisation are thus re-examined, with a focus on clarifying the predictions for future valid examples of conflicting directionality.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , December 2009 , pp. 369 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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