The adaptation of Sino-Japanese kan-on

Thesis

Japanese has had historical language contacts with varieties of Chinese in different periods, resulting in the large-scale intake of loanwords. This thesis focuses on the segmental and structural adaptation in Sino-Japanese kan-on, i.e. Late Middle Chinese (LMC) loanwords in Early Middle Japanese (EMJ), specifically the adaptation of LMC initial and coda consonants in EMJ. The thesis consists of two corpus analyses and a psycholinguistic experimental study. A database of 2136 kanji is assembled for the corpus analyses. The phonological analysis in this thesis is based on the distinctive feature organisation proposed by the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon model (Lahiri, 2018). This thesis aims to contribute empirical evidence to the phonetics vs phonology theoretical debate in loanword adaptation literature.

The first corpus analysis investigates the adaptation of LMC initial consonants in EMJ. While some data can be explained by both phonology and perception accounts, there are two pieces of evidence that shows that the adaptation follows the phonology-based perception theory. Perceptual similarity in EMJ is guided by the contrasts and processes in the native phonology.

The second corpus analysis and the experimental study investigate the adaptation of LMC coda consonants in EMJ and Modern Japanese. The corpus analysis presents historical adaptation data. The experimental study tests the historical data in Modern Japanese, revealing aspects of EMJ that persist in Modern Japanese and complementing the corpus results on vowel epenthesis. The findings together show that Japanese avoids illegal coda structures by vowel epenthesis. The quality of the epenthetic vowel is determined by two phonological processes, default insertion and vowel harmony. The default epenthetic vowel is the [DORSAL, HIGH] vowel /u/, but in cases where the nucleus in the source form (1) ends with a [CORONAL, HIGH] segment and (2) undergoes contraction during adaptation, it can trigger an epenthetic vowel harmony. The epenthetic vowel harmony is not affected by coda PLACE. Default insertion supports the phonetic account, and vowel harmony is better explained by the phonology motivated theories.

The thesis demonstrates that both perception and phonology play a role in Sino-Japanese kan-on adaptation. It calls for a unification of the theories for explaining a wider range of loanword adaptation data. 

Authors: Zeng, H

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-xmpyxvkpo
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: historical linguistics; phonology; psycholinguistics; Sino-Japanese
• Subjects: Linguistics