If rendaku isn’t a rule, what in the world is it?

要旨

The morphophonemic voicing phenomenon in Japanese known as rendaku is highly irregular, but several factors are believed to make rendaku more or less likely. This paper reviews some experiments intended to test the psychological reality of three such factors: Lyman’s Law, the semantic relationship between the two elements in noun + verb compound nouns, and salient semantic or phonological resemblances between novel compounds and existing compounds. The evidence suggests that each of these factors has at least a detectable effect on responses in experimental situations. Any realistic overall account of rendaku will have to incorporate a significant degree of intractable irregularity, but it will also have to be consistent with the intuition of naïve native speakers that rendaku is predictable.

主題