UC Santa Cruz

68 Pages·2015·2.09 MB·English

by  Maho Morimoto

UC Santa Cruz
UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Degemination in Japanese Loanwords from Italian
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8p95v6sw
Author
Morimoto, Maho
Publication Date
2015

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

SANTA CRUZ

DEGEMINATION IN JAPANESE LOANWORDS FROM ITALIAN

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

LINGUISTICS

by

Maho Morimoto

September 2015

The thesis of Maho Morimoto
is approved:

_______________________________
Professor Armin Mester, Chair

_______________________________
Professor Junko Itô

_______________________________
Associate Professor Grant McGuire

_______________________________
Tyrus Miller
Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies

Table of Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Background 3
2.1 ItalianandJapanesePhonemeInventories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2 TheStatusofGeminatesinItalianandJapanese . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.1 GeminatesinItalian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.2 GeminatesinJapanese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2.3 GeminatesinOrthographicSystems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.3 PhonologicalRepresentationofGeminates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3 TheBasicDataandtheProposal 11
3.1 TheData . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.2 TheProposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4 TheoreticalAssumptionsandtheBasicAnalysis 22
4.1 Output-outputFaithfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.2 PositionalFaithfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4.3 Derivingthepositionaleffectinzuccotto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5 Variation 27
5.1 FreeVariation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
5.2 CompensatoryLengthening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.3 Implicationalhierarchyoffaithfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
5.4 SummaryandPredictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
6 ANonce-adaptationSurvey 38
6.1 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6.1.1 Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6.1.2 Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
6.1.3 Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
6.2 ResultsandDiscussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
6.2.1 EffectofTypesofGeminates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
6.2.2 EffectofPositionofGeminates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
6.2.3 InteractionofPositionandTypesofGeminates . . . . . . . . . 51
6.3 SummaryandFurtherDevelopment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
7 Conclusion 55
AppendixTheSurvey 57
iii
List of Figures
1 GenresofItalianborrowingsinJapanese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2 Frequencyofratingresponses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3 Averageratingsforeachtypeofinput . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
4 Average ratings for outputs containing liquid geminates (“yes”) and
outputswithoutone(“no”). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
5 Preferences for operation per types of geminates. Note that the same
rating is used twice to calculate this, once for weak geminates, once
againforstronggeminates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
6 AverageRatingforoutputsincludinggeminatesineitherweakposition
(C1) or strong position (C2) (outputs without any geminates (i.e. no
preservation)wereeliminatedfromtheanalysis). . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
7 Average ratings for outputs depending on whether they contained a
geminate,(a)intheweakpositionor(b)strongposition. . . . . . . . . 47
8 Preferred operation for geminates in (a) weak position and (b) strong
position. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
9 Preferences depending on the faithfulness relationship between strong
andweakgeminates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
10 Preferencesdependingontheoutputtypes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
11 Preferences for operation per types of geminates within (a) weak gem-
inatesand(b)stronggeminates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
iv
Abstract
DEGEMINATIONINJAPANESELOANWORDSFROMITALIAN
by
MahoMorimoto
In Japanese native phonology, geminate consonants are contrastive (as in [kata]
‘shoulder’ vs. [katta] ‘win-PAST’), but geminates in loanwords can have differing
sources and motivations (see Kubozono, Itô, Mester 2009, Kawagoe 2015, and ref-
erences cited therein): we see gemination of singletons in loanwords from English,
in which consonant length is not distinctive ([kæt] ‘cat’ [kjatto] ), whereas
Eng Jp
!
we see geminate-preservation in loanwords from Italian ([espresso] ‘espresso’
It
!
[esupuresso] ), in which the length of most consonants is contrastive. In loanwords
Jp
from Italian, however, not all geminates are preserved. This research addresses the
cases of degemination, and captures the pattern as stress-based neutralization (Beck-
man 1998) of consonant length within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince &
Smolensky 1993). Through a database built from dictionaries and a nonce-adaptation
survey conducted online, it confirms the preference towards geminates in penultimate
position and the ban against geminates in other positions, especially for liquid gemi-
nates.
v
Acknowledgments
MygreatestthankstoArminMester,JunkoItô,andGrantMcGuirefortheirinvalu-
able input and guidance, as well as their patience. Thanks are also due to the partici-
pantsofWinter2015ResearchSeminar,PranavAnandandMartinKrämerforhelping
me developing this project. I am also grateful to Clara Sherley-Appel, Jeff Adler, and
NaoyaWatabeforcomments,advice,andsupport,JedSamPizarro-GuevaraandAllan
Schwadeforhelpingmewiththedataanalysis,aswellasMattiaDamaggioforsharing
nativejudgments. Allerrorsaremyown.
vi
1 Introduction
ThispaperisconcernedwiththeweightpreservationinJapaneseloanwords1 fromItal-
ian,withspecialfocusonthepatternsofdegemination. WhilebothItalianandJapanese
have anative contrastin consonantlength, asillustrated in(1), geminates inItalian are
knowntodegeminatewhenadaptedintoJapanese,undercertaincircumstances.
(1) Japanese [kata] ‘shoulder’ vs. [katta] ‘win-PAST’
Italian [fato] ‘fath’ vs. [fatto] ‘fact’
It has been statistically observed that Italian geminates are more likely to be preserved
whentheybelongtothelastthree-syllablewindowintheadaptedforms(Tanaka,2007).
Thisismostobviouslyillustratedinwordsincludingmultiplegeminateswithinaword,
shownbelow. Throughoutthepaper,IusetheacuteaccentmarktoindicatebothItalian
stress-accent and Japanese pitch-accent to ease the comparison. Non-accentedness in
Japanesewillbeindicatedby[-].
(2) source loan Italianorthography gloss
a. zukkótto zukótto zuccotto (atypeofcake)
!
b. orekkjétte orekiétte orecchiette (atypeofpasta)
!
c. kaffellátte kaferátte caffèlatte ‘cafelatte’
!
Theprimarygoalofthispaperistoinvestigatethemotivatingfactorsofthispositional
effect on degemination and to propose a formal analysis within the framework of stan-
dard Optimality Theory (OT: Prince and Smolensky 1993), as well as to examine the
1Inthispaper,Iuse“[languagename]borrowings”torefertoborrowingsfromthelanguage. Forexam-
ple, “Italian borrowings” refer to words that were borrowed from Italian into Japanese. The recipient
languageisalwaysJapanese,unlessotherwiseindicated. Ontheotherhand,Iwilluse“Japaneseloan-
words”asacovertermforwordsthatwereadaptedtoJapanesefromotherlanguages. Throughoutthe
paper,IwillbereferringtotheTokyodialectofJapaneseunlessotherwiseindicated.
1
predictions and ramifications of the hypothesis. I will claim that the asymmetry in
the adaptation of geminates can be explained as stress-based positional neutralization,
whereby the contrast in consonant length is preferentially preserved in the prominent
position in the source form. The flow of the paper is as follows: section 2 lays out the
relevant properties of the two languages, and clarifies my assumptions regarding the
phonologicalrepresentationofgeminatesandthenotationthatIwillbeusingthrough-
out the paper. Section 3 presents the basic data and my proposal. Section 4 establishes
a formal analysis pertaining to my generalization of the data. Section 5 discusses the
variationintheadaptedforms. Section6isareportonanonlinenonce-wordadaptation
study,andsection7concludes.
2
2 Background
2.1 Italian and Japanese Phoneme Inventories
ThebuildingblocksofItalianandJapanesearestrikinglysimilar. Thefollowingcharts
representtheItalianandJapanesevowelinventories:
(3) ItalianandJapanesevowelinventories(Krämer,2009;Labrune,2012)
a. Italian b. Japanese
back +back back +back
� �
+high i u +high i u
e o e o
E O +low a
+low a
TheJapanesehighbackunroundedvowel,[W],willbeindicatedas[u]forsimplic-
ity. Italian mid lax vowels [E, O] are only contrastive in stressed syllables, and will be
simplified to [e, o] in this paper to emphasize their correspondence to Japanese [e] and
[o].
Theconsonantalphonemeinventoriesarealsosimilarbetweenthesetwolanguages.
In (4), we see that the Japanese consonant inventory is almost the subset of Italian
inventory,exceptfor[h]and[].
3