Apophonie dans les toponymes composés en japonais

要旨

In Japanese, a limited set of words may undergo final vowel alternation, also called apophony, when they are the first element of a compound word. Although research about apophonic compounds has been prolific in Japanese historical linguistics, only a few studies have looked into the status of apophony in modern Japanese. The present study gathered a corpus of 2604 apophonic toponyms and 983 unique toponyms from the Japan Post Holdings zipcodes database. An apophony dampening effect of 1-mora first elements and a decrease of apophony with the second element’s length were found as in previous studies on common apophonic compounds (Labrune & Irwin 2020). However, contrary to common compounds, a possible relationship between apophony and rendaku was observed: compounds with rendaku had a lower apophony rate. The dialectal variation was also looked at, with Chūgoku and Shikoku having the lowest apophony while Kyūshū had the highest. No clear pattern for individual first elements were found but some specific compounds showed a pattern: this is similar to what was reported on rendaku in toponyms (Van Bokhorst 2018; Takemura et al. 2019).

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