earticle

영어

This paper analyzes assimilation and its blocking (i.e., coda reduction) in Kagoshima Japanese consonant clusters. Kagoshima Japanese exhibits deletion of non-initial high vowels. Word final consonants caused by apocope are reduced in systematic fashion: That is (i) stops and affricates are reduced to glottal stop, (ii) fricatives neutralize to voiceless, (iii) nasals change to placeless moraic nasal, (iv) flap becomes nonsyllabic high front vowel. Consonant clusters (i.e., C1C2) created by syncope are assimilated or reduced depending on the combinations of consonants. Especially if C1 is stop, there occurs assimilation or coda reduction depending on the type of C2 (i.e., trigger manner treated in Jun (1995)): (i) stops entirely assimilate to following obstruents (e.g., stops and fricatives), but (ii) stops reduce to glottal stops before sonorants (e.g., nasals and glides), that is, assimilation is blocked. Jun (1995) proposes implicational statement about trigger manner from investigating 17 languages: (a) if nonnasal sonorants trigger place assimilation, so do nasals and fricatives, (b) if nasals or fricatives trigger place assimilation, so do stops. And he formalizes these implicational relation to preservation hierarchy on trigger manner. Our empirical surveys on Kagoshima Japanese, however, shows that there is also an implicational relation between fricatives and nasals: if nasals trigger place assimilation, so do fricatives, but not vice versa. This result can lead us to elaborate the preservation hierarchy on trigger manner.