Rendaku and morphological correspondence

要旨

In Japanese compounding, rendaku (sequential voicing) is not equally applicable to every Yamato morpheme; there are several morphemes that are lexically immune to this operation even if phonological context allows it. Interestingly enough, such morphemes undergo rendaku in reduplication. In this article, I argue for morphological correspondences that are crucial in the investigation of the applicability of rendaku within the framework of Optimality Theory. I point out that Output-Output faithfulness constraints that require phonological identity between morphologically related words give a plausible account for the problem. The difference in the application of rendaku between normal compounds and reduplicated forms arises from the two distinct morphological structures and the Base-Reduplicant faithfulness constraint that is ranked relatively low in constraint ranking.

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