Shigeto Kawahara

UMass Amherst

The markedness hierarchy of geminates and mimetic gemination in Japanese

More often than not, languages allow only a subset of segments to be 
geminated, but the issue of the segmental restrictions on geminates has been 
relatively understudied. Against this background, we motivate a total 
markedness hierarchy of geminates in Japanese through an experimental 
investigation of mimetic gemination. The results suggest that the relative 
sonority of a geminate generally correlates with its markedness (Kawahara 
2005; Podesva 2002), with one complication that a geminate [r] is more 
marked than a geminate glide. The markedness hierarchy revealed in the study 
is expressed in terms of an Optimality Theoretic constraint ranking (Prince 
and Smolensky 2004): *Gem[r] > *GemGlide > *GemNas > *GemFric > *GemStop. 
This ranking goes beyond what can be motivated from evidence in Japanese 
phonology or from lexical frequency. We thus argue that this total ranking 
reflects a universal markedness hierarchy of geminates, itself being 
grounded in the perceptual imperative to keep geminacy contrasts distinct 
(Kawahara 2005).