[ai]-[au] ASYMMETRY IN ENGLISH AND JAPANESE

要旨

It has been pointed out by Katayama (1998) that [ai] and [au] exhibit an asymmetrical pattern in some phonological phenomena in Japanese. Building on this analysis, this paper argues that the asymmetry in question is observed in a much wider range of phonological phenomena in Japanese and, moreover, that this generalization can be extended to other vowel sequences such as [oi], [eu], [ui] and [iu]. The paper also demonstrates that [ai] and [au] exhibit contrastive patterns in English and other languages as well, where [au] forms a less stable and harmonic syllable nucleus than [ai].

主題