Armin Mester

Armin Mester of University of California Santa Cruz will speak at the UCSD Linguistics Department Colloquium on April 13, 2009, at 2:00 pm in AP&M 4301.

Gemination and the prosody of loanwords in Japanese

In Japanese loanwords from English, obstruents that occupy coda position (or are ambisyllabic) in the source language sometimes appear geminated, sometimes not:

cap > kyap.pu        BUT     captain  > kya.pu.ten











bat > bat.to                 butter  > ba.taa











listen > ris.sun             listener  > ri.su.naa











tax > tak.ku.su              tact  > ta.ku.to











frog > fu.rog.gu             log  > ro.gu

Predicting when gemination occurs, and when not, is a well-known problem, and no simple solution based on properties of the English inputs has emerged. This talk has two main goals: (i) To account for both newly established and well-known generalizations regarding obstruent gemination in Japanese loanwords. (ii) To demonstrate the extent to which loanword formation is constrained by the native (Yamato and Sino-Japanese) phonology.