LANGUAGE AND SPEECH, 1989,32(3), 249 -278
249
THE MORA AND SYLLABLE STRUCTURE IN JAPANESE:
EVIDENCE FROM SPEECH ERRORS”
HARUOKUBOZONO
Naiizart University,Nagoya, Japan
The goal of this paper is to demonstratc the role and reality of the linguistic unit called
‘rnora’ in Japanese through analysis of several types of speech error and other linguistic
phenomena. It is shown that the mora is an indispensable notion for the description and
generalization of the patterns underlying speech errors in Japanese. Specifically, analysis of
blend errors suggests that mora boundaries are the most common switch point in Japanese,
which supports the conception of the linguistic construct as being a psychologically real unit
of speech production. In addition t o the question of the mora, some related questions are
also addressed, notably the psychological reality of the syllable and the syllable constituents
of Japanese.
Key words: Japanese, mora, speech errors, syllable structure
INTRODUCTION
The roIes and reality of the linguistic unit called ‘mora’ have been discussed in much
depth in Japanese phonetics and phonology. Phoneticians such as Han (1962), for
example, claim that the mora is a temporal unit in Japanese, so that the phonetic
duration of utterances crucially hinges upon the number of morae involved.’ Kubozono
(1 987) points out the importance of the unit from another phonetic viewpoint by stating
that the extent of pitch drops induced by (word) accents in connected speech can be
largely predicted from the number of morae in post-accentual position.
The mora has been recognized as a relevant unit in phonological descriptions as well.
hlcCawley (1978), for instance, notes that it serves as a temporal unit in accent assign-
I am grateful to Anne Cutler and Joseph Stemberger for their valuable comments and
suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. They do not necessarily agree with the
ideas and conclusions expressed, for which I am solely responsible. I am also indebted
to Yasushi Terao, who allowed me to use his collection of blend errors. The work
reported on in this paper was supported by grants from The hlinistry of Education,
Science and Culture (No. 63710086 and No. 4912501 14260) and Nanzan University
Pache Research grants (1 987, 1989).
Address correspondence to: Dr. Haruo Kubozono, Dept, of British & American
Studies, Nanzan University, 18 Yamazato-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya, 466 Japan; o r via
e-mail, KUBOZONO@JPNCUNIO. bitnet.
This said, it must be added that not all scholars agree on the phonetic reality of the
mora. See Beckman (1982), for example, for a critical view of this problem.
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Mora and Syllable Stnictrire in Japanese
250
ment. One of the typical examples of this is the accent assignment rule for borrowed
words, which places the accent on the syllable that contains the antepenultimate mora.
Since the number of syllables is not relevant for this rule, and, moreover, because
syllables in Japanese generally consist of not more than two morae, as will be noted
shortly, accent is placed either on the third o r fourth mora from the end o f the word, as
illustrated in (la) and (lb) respectively. (The accent is marked by an apostrophe
immediately after the mora bearing it. The mora and syllable boundaries are marked
by 1.1 and /-I respectively; all the syllable boundaries are also mora boundaries, by
definition.)
ACCENTUATION
(1)
SYLLABLEIhIORA STRUCTURE
GLOSS
a.
/do’rama/
Ipura’t on/
Isutora’ikil
Ireko’odol
/poke? to/
do-ra-ma
pu-ra-to.n
su-to-ra .i-ki
re-ko.0-do
po-ke .t-to
‘drama’
‘Plato’
‘strike’
‘record’
‘pocket ’
b.
/dera’kkusu/
/wasi’nton/
Isuto’oriil
de-ra. k-ku-su
wa-si .n-to .n
su-to.0-ri.i
‘deluxe’
’Washington’
‘story’
While the mora has been discussed in much depth in the literature, little is known
about the role and relevance of the syllable in Japanese. Apart from the phonetic
definition and description of the unit in terms of the arguably universal sonority scale,
the only place in which the syllable is recognized as relevant in Japanese phonology is,
in fact, in the description of accent assignment rules, where it is defined as the bearer
of the accent. The conception of the syllable as the accent-bearing unit may be taken as
a matter of course in discussions of other languages, but it deserves special attention in
Japanese where the mora is believed to play the more important role in the phonological
system in general. The antepenultimate rule for borrowed words sketched in (1)’ for
example, can be formulated in the most general form if the syllable is defined as the
bearer of the accent: The accent is on the syllable coiitaiiiiiig the aiitepeiiultiiirate nioru
The syllable thus justified in phonological terms falls into two types with respect
to its internal composition: ‘long syllables’, which consist of two morae, and ‘short
syllables’, which are made up of one mora (cf. hlccawley, 1978)? Long syllables d o not
consist of two morae of equal status, but are sequences o f what I call a ‘syllabic mora’,
which can form a (short) syllable on its own, and a ‘non-syllabic mora’, which cannot
constitute a syllable by itself. Previous studies reveal that syllabic morae outnumber
-
~
Tabata (1988) notes that Japanese permits the maximal structure of CVVCC in
phrasal expressions in colloquial speech. Such structures as CVVC o r CVCC are also
permitted, but they occur mostly in borrowed words or onomatopoeic expressions
and are, therefore, to be seen as structures of peripheral status in Japanese. This fact
seems to justify hlcCawley’s classification of the Japanese syllable into two basic
types.
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H. Ktibozorio
251
non-syllabic morae by at least three to one, so that short syllables outnumber long
syllables by at least two to one (cf. hliyajima et al., 1982):
EVIDENCEFOR THE hfORA
As sketched above, there are several lines of evidence that support the relevance of
the mora in Japanese phonetics and phonology. However, past studies often simply show
that the mora is consistent with the data, without going so far as t o develop a serious
argument that the mora hypothesis is significantly superior t o other hypotheses.
Specifically, since syllable boundaries are also mora boundaries in Japanese (although
not vice versa), one may naturally wonder if the syllable alone can handle the data
reasonably well. The question which must be addressed, therefore, is if there is a
significant amount of data that can be accounted for by the mora but not by the syllable.
In this light, speech error data which are t o be discussed here provide several crucial
pieces of evidence.
In contrast to the great interest in speech errors in English and other European
languages, little attention has been paid to the study of speech errors in Japanese and
its relevance t o linguistic theory. There are, accordingly, very few collections of
spontaneous errors and linguistic analyses reported in the literature. The data to be
discussed in this study consist of about 1,500 errors which come from three major
sources - collections by the writer, by Terao (cf. Terao, 1984), and by Tabusa (1982) with some errors also taken from Tonoike (1983). These data were collected well in
advance of the formulation of the analyses to be presented below.
Sic bstitutioii and transposition errors
Phonological patterns underlying substitution and transposition errors in Japanese
were analyzed by Kubozono (1985), who gave the following two lines of evidence for
the reality of the mora. It was noted, first of all, that long (i.e., birnoraic) syllables tend
to be replaced by long syllables or a sequence of two short (i.e., mono-moraic) syllables
rather than by a single short syllable. In the data consisting of 6 4 substitutionltransposition errors, replacements of a long syllable by another long syllable, illustrated in
(2a), and by a sequence of two short syllables, illustrated in (2b), account for 41
instances (64%) and 14 instances (22%), respectively, while replacement by a single short
syllable, as in (2c), accounts for only nine instances (14%). The fact that a long syllable
tends to be replaced by a sequence of two short syllables rather than by a single short
These ratios were obtained on the basis of a statistical study cited in hliyajima et al.
(1 982), which analyzes the frequency of each mora type and subtype in written texts
comprising 40,000 morae, arbitrarily selected from Japanese newspapers and magazines, The assumed ratio of the syllabic mora as against the non-syllabic mora is a
rather conservative estimate because the original statistical study groups syllabic
morae consisting solely of a vowel together with vocalic non-syllabic morae: If the
data are readjusted properly, the syllabic mora accounts for well over three-quarters
of the corpus (cf. Kubozono, 1985).
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Mora and Syllable Structure irt Japanese
252
syllable can best be interpreted in terms of the phonological length (or, equivalently,
phonological weight) of syllables: The syllable weight of long syllables is double that
of short syllables and is equivalent to the weight of two short syllables combined.
(2) a. se-ka.i re.n-po.0 si.n-bii.11
Vorld Federation Newspaper’
-, se-ka.i re.n-bu.n
+ ki-ku-no
b. kjo. o-no ki-ku-zi-ro.0
‘Kyoono Kikujiroo’ (personal name)
.. .ra. i-ne.n
c. kjo-ne.n
‘last year..
.next year’
-, kjo-ne.n
ki-ku-ji-ro
si.n-bu.n
.o
. . .kjo-ne.n
The other line of evidence Kubozono (1985) cites comes from errors as given in (3)
and (4), which are both commonly observed in Japanese:
(3) a. mo.0-ta.a
ba.i-ku
‘motorbike’
m0.i-ta.a ba.i-ku
-f
b. ko.0-zu.i
-.,
tju.u-i-ho.0
‘Rood warning’
ko .o-zu .ti tju .u-i-ho.0
c. zju-u-go pa.a-se.n-to
‘fifteen percent’
-,zju-u-go pa.11-se.n-to
d. ku .u-bo mi.d-do-we.i
‘Aircraft Carrier Midway’
-+
ku.b-bo mi-d-do-we .i
e. ko.0-tja.n hu-ku-ka.i-tjo.0
‘Deputy Chairman Korchan’
+ ko.0-tja.a
hu-ku-ka.i-tjo.0
f. zi.n-ke.n
de ko-ma.t-te
i-ru
‘troubled with the problem of human rights’
-, .. .ko-ma.n-te i-ru
(4) a. ka .n-ke.i
3
b. no-re.n
m0.n-da.i
ka.i-ze.n
‘relationship improvement’
ka.i-ke.n ka.i-ze.n
ni u-de-o-si
‘pushing the curtain’ (proverb) = ‘waste of labor’
ni no-re-0-si
-,ii-de.n
The errors given in (3) and (4) reveal two facts of special interest which are not
generally reported about errors in English and other languages. First, unlike speech errors
in English (cf. Fromkin, 1973; Stemberger, 1983), Japanese speech errors often involve
the split of complex (i.e., long or diphthongal) vowels as well as long consonants: Errors
in (3a) and (3c)-(3d) are those in which long vowels are split; those in’(3b) and (4a)
show the splitting of diphthongal vowel clusters; and in (30 a long consonant is split.
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H. Kiibozotio
253
What this fact suggests ‘is that complex vowels and long consonants in Japanese, unlike
the comparable units in English, need not be interpreted as unitary in phonological
description.
The other point of interest about the errors in (3) and (4), which is more relevant
t o our present discussion, is the fact that in the type of errors just mentioned, vowels
can be replaced by consonants and consonants by vowels: Errors in (3c) and (3d) involve
the replacement of the second member of long vowels by a nasal and an obstruent,
respectively; the error in (3e) replaces a nasal with the second member of a long vowel;
the error in (4a) involves the metathesis of a nasal and the second member of a
diphthongal vowel cluster. As might be suspected from these examples, the vowelconsonant interactions in question occur only in syllable-final positions, or, to be more
precise, only involve the final segments of long syllables. Seen conversely, vowelconsonant interactions never occur with the segments in short syllables or with those
in the initial part of long syllables; such errors as given in (5) are not observed in
Japanese, even if the resulting sequences perfectly satisfy the phonotactic rules of the
language.
(5) a. Ika-me-ral
‘camera’
b. lai-ronl ‘iron’
-t
-t
*/aa-me-ra/
*/tti-ronl
This recalls discussions of a strong constraint on the segments which can interact in
English errors. The existence of such a constraint has been taken as strong evidence for
the reality of syllable-internal constituents such as onset, peak (nucleus), and coda (cf.
Boomer and Laver, 1968; Stemberger, 1983). Applying this line of argument to the
Japanese data under consideration, it can be said that the second elements of long vowels
and diphthongs occupy the same position within ‘the syllable, as d o the first part of
long consonants and the syllable-final nasal. Since the maximal syllable in Japanese is
generally CVC or CVV (cf. Note 2), this means that it has the structure given in (6):
The syllable structure in (6) may look rather strange to those who are familiar with the
traditional syllable model given in (7) whereby syllable-final vocalic elements are interpreted as belonging t o a ‘peak’ together with the nuclear vowel itself, and the sylfablefinal consonants are assigned t o the coda!
See Pike (1955/67), Vincent (1986), and Fudge (1987), among others. Poser (1984)
and Abe (1986) describe the syllable structure of Japanese on the basis of this model,
but they do so without justifying the model with empirical evidence from the language.
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Mora and Syllable Stnrcture in Japanese
254
The discrepancy between the strange-looking syllable structure in ( 6 ) and the
traditional model in (7) can be resolved in two different ways. One of them is t o assign
the post-nuclear elements, both vocalic and consonantal, to the coda of the syllable,
as illustrated in (8). While the interactions between vowels and consonants in syllablefinal positions follow from this syllable structure, it is disfavored for two reasons. First,
there is no other independent motivation in Japanese for grouping vocalic elements
and consonantal elements into one syllable unit ‘coda’. Second, and more important,
there is little or no evidence in Japanese for a syllable constituent corresponding t o the
rhyme. As will be discussed later, in fact, linguistic evidence from the language hints at
cohesiveness between the onset and the peak rather than between the peak and the coda,
which suggests that Japanese exhibits a unique (or, at least, rather un-Germanic) behavior
as far as syllable phenomena are concerned. If this is the case, it is indeed not reasonable
to take the traditional syllable model in (7) for granted and apply it a priori to the
description of Japanese.
An
(8)
Onset
I
C
x
(9)
Rhyme
Peak
1
v
hlora
hlora
c v
c/v
A
Coda
I
clv
I
If the analysis in (8) is disfavored for these reasons, the only way t o account for the
assumed constraint within the syllable is to assume the mora as a relevant unit in speech
production in Japanese: If one defines the mora as a level intermediate between the
syllable and the segment, the vowel-consonant interactions in (3) and (4) can be
described not as segmental errors but as moraic errors, in which the non-syllable mora of
one long syllable (that is, the second mora of a bimoraic Syllable) is replaced by the nonsyllabic mora of another long syllable. Under this analysis, the syllable structure in ( 6 )
will now look like (9), and the errors in (3) and (4) can be represented as in (10) and (1 1)
respectively, where non-syllabic morae are represented by the conventional capitalized
letters, /J/, /R/, IN/, and /Q/.5
(10) a. nb.R.ta.R
ba.J.ku
+
b. k0.R.zu.J t j u 3 . i . h o . R
m 0 J . t a . R ba.J.ku
-*
k0.R.zu.R
tju.R.i.ho.R
’ /J/
and /R/ represent the second element of complex vowels (i.e., of diphthongal
vowel sequences and long vowels respectively). /N/ and /Q/ denote the syllable-final
rnoraic nasal and the first element of long consonants, respectively, both of which are
homorganic with the following consonants. These abstract representations are required
to describe the ‘origin’ and ‘target’ of errors appropriately (e.g., (3d) and (3e)), and
this provides another replication of work on other languages in support of what Stemberger (1 983) calls ‘doubling’ or ‘suprasegmental’ analysis of contrastive .vowel and
consonant length. See Kubozono (1985) for more evidence from speech errors in
Japanese for this analysis.
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255
H. Kubozono
c. zju.R.go pa.R.se.N.to
u
-+
d. ku.;yR.bo rni.9.do.we.J
zju.R.go pa.N.se.N.to
-+
ku.Q.bo mi.Q.do.we.J
e. k0.R.tja.N hu.ku.ka.J.tj0.R
f. zi.N.ke.N m0.N.da.J
(11) a. ka.&J
k0.R.tja.R
...
de ko.ma.Q.te
-+
-r
I
zi.N.ke.N m0.N.da.J de ko.ma.N.te
ka.J.ze.N
ka.J.ke.N ka.J.2e.N
+
or
ka.N.ke.J ka.J.2e.N +. ka.J.ke.N ka.J.2e.N
b. no-re.N
ni u-de-o-si
-+
ti-de.N
ni no-re-0-si
Blend errors
The psychological reality of the mora in Japanese is further substantiated by the
analysis of blends, another type of speech error in which two words are fused into a single
word.6 The blend data analyzed in this study consist of 76 spontaneous errors, including
those given in (12) (cf. Appendix l).’
(12) a. 2a.a-sa.i
b. pe-ni.i
‘Chinese pickles’ / ra.a-me.n
‘penny’/ pea-su
‘pence’
c. to-ma-re
‘stop’ (imperative)
d. so-bi+-to
‘Soviet’ / so-re.n
-r
‘Chinese noodle’
-, 2a.a-me.n
pe-ni-su
/ su-t0.p-pu
‘stop’ -,to-ma.p-pu
‘Soviet Union’
-+
so-be.n
A glance at these examples reveals several interesting features underlying the blending.
First of all, it involves two words of a syntactic category such that a noun is blended with
another noun, a verb with another verb, etc. There is no exception t o this rule, which
confirms Terao’s (1 984) claim that there is a strong syntactic (categorical) constraint on
the two words to be blended. hloreover, blending of two nouns seems by far the most
popular pattern, as is illustrated in Table I:
I d o not discuss phrase blends and other blends of two units larger than the word. In
the absence of sufficient data, I also exclude ‘syntagmatic’ word blends, which are
produced by the contraction of a sequence of two words (possibly with a conjunction
analogous to ‘and’ o r ‘or’ in between): eg., sakkau l o rugubii ‘soccer and rugby’ -+
sugubi. See Fromkin (1973) and Stemberger (1983) for similar errors in English.
’ I owe much of these data to Yasushi Terao.
The category ‘adverb’ includes interrogative adverbs and interjections as well.
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Mora and Syllable Structure in Japanese
256
TABLEI
Blend errors classified according to syntactic category and
morphological complexity
No. of instances (%)
Noun-Noun
56 (74%)
SimpIexSimplex
Simplex-Compound
Compound-Compound
36 (47%)
6 (8%)
1 4 (18%)
Verb-Verb
11 (14%)
Adjective-Adjective
3 (4%)
Adverb-Adverb
6
Total
(8%)
76 (100%)
In semantic terms, the process generally involves two semantically similar, if not
identical, words; in many cases, it involves the blending of a native Japanese word and
a borrowed word of equivalent semantic content (cf. (12c)). The resultant forms are
often nonsense words, but in some cases they happen t o be an existing meaningful word:
e.g., (12a) zoamat ‘semen’ and (1 2b) pazi& ‘penis’.
The morphological pattern underlying the blending is also obvious: The initial part
of one word is combined with the non-initial part of another, as represented in (13). In
fact, my corpus o f data contains only one exception, given in (14), which seems to
involve an additional consonant substitution.
(13) AB/XY
-+
AY
(14) yu-t‘a ‘Uta’ / ne-ba-ta
‘Nevada’
-+
yu-ka-ta
While the semantic and morphological patterns can be defined rather clearly, the
phonological structure of the blend process is often ambiguous such that it can be
analyzed as taking place either at mora, syllable, or syllable constituent boundaries. In
fact, out of the total of 75 instances that follow the morphological pattern in (13),
there are only nine unambiguous instances (12%) such as (12b)-(12d), whereas. 6 6
instances (88%) are ambiguous in some way or other, as illustrated in (15) as regards the
blend in (12a). This ratio of ambiguous examples appears strikingly high, especially when
it is compared with the figures for other language^,^ but it may not be so surprising if
According to Stemberger (personal communication), the proportion of ambiguous
cases is about 21% in English.
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H. Kitbozono
257
TABLE 2
Switch point in unambiguous blend errors
No. of instances
Switch point
hlora boundary
Syllable boundary
Onset-Peak boundary
Total
one realizes that there are only five vowels in Japanese (as compared to, say, fourteen
in English).
(15) a. Switch at mora boundaries
za.(a-sa.i) / (ra.)a-me.n
b. Switch at syllable boundaries
za.a-(sa.i) / (ra.a-)me.n
-f
4
2a.a-me.n
za.a-me.n
c. Switch a t onset-peak boundaries
z(a.a-sa.i) / (r)a.a-me.n -,za.a-me.n
Given the high proportion of ambiguous examples, there seem to be two ways of
evaluating the data: One is to analyze unambiguous examples alone while discarding
ambiguous examples totally; the other is t o employ the method whereby ambiguous
instances are counted twofold or threefold along with unambiguous instances. In the case
of the Japanese data under consideration, the first method is apparently not useful
because of the extremely small number of unambiguous instances. As shown in Table 2,
the subset is too small t o make a compelling case although it is probably worth noting
that switches at a mora boundary account for most of the instances, e.g., (12b) and ( 1 2 ~ ) .
To solve this dilemma arising from the high proportion of ambiguous instances, I
analyzed the data using the second method mentioned above. The result of this analysis is
summarized in Table 3, which shows how many of the 76 blends can be handled by the
three types of analysis: The mora-based analysis is obviously capable of accounting for
the data best of all, leaving just three instances - (14), (12d), and another analogous
example - while the syllable-based analysis cannot account for some 30 percent of the
data including 21 errors, or about a quarter of the total, which can be handled properly
by the mora analysis.
While nearly all of the data can be seen as errors in which two words are split and
subsequently blended a t mora boundaries, it may be argued against this line of
generalization that syllables are inherently at a disadvantage in Japanese: Because all
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Mora arid Syllable Stnictzire in Japanese
258
TABLE3
Switch point in blend errors
(ambiguous and unambiguous instances combined)
Switch point
No. of instances (5%)
Syllable boundary
73 (96%)
52 (68%)
Onset-Peak boundary
44 (59%)
Mora boundary
Total
76 (1 00%)
syllable boundaries are mora boundaries by definition, it is apriori impossible t o find any
data in favor of the syllable that are against the mora, while it is possible t o find evidence
for the mora that argues against the syllable. It is nevertheless possible t o make a fair
comparison of the two types of analysis, the mora-based and the syllable-based. As
mentioned above, the statistical study cited in hliyajima et aI. (1982) reveals that syllabic
morae (i.e., morae that constitute a syllable on their own and those that form the first
part of bimoraic syllables) outnumber non-syllabic morae (i.e., morae that form the
second part of bimoraic syllables) by at least three t o one. Since mora boundaries fall
into two types - those which are also syllable boundaries and those which are not - this
statistical result means that the first type of mora boundary outnumbers the second
type by at least three t o one. This corollary allows us t o establish the following hypothesis concerning the switch point at which blend errors occur: If the mora is not a
relevant unit while the syllable is, switch at the first type of mora boundary will account
for well over three quarters of the data; if the mora is a relevant unit, on the other hand,
blend errors will involve splitting two words at mora boundaries indiscriminately, the
first mora boundary accounting for a percentage of errors that does not exceed its relative
frequency in the language. Table 4 shows the result of this reanalysis of the 73 instances
which can be analyzed by the mora in Table 3.
The reanalyzed data in Table 4 show that switches at the first type of mora boundary
are not particularly preferred, accounting for less than three quarters of the data. Blends
occur at the two types of mora boundary approximately at the ratio of three to one, the
ratio at which the two types of mora boundary generally occur in the language, suggesting
that blends occur at mora boundaries irrespective of whether they coincide with syllable
boundaries or not.
The claim that we need an independent unit corresponding t o the mora can be further
supported by the existence of a length rule underlying the blend errors. Terao (1984)
claims that the blend process is subject to a constraint on the length of the words in
such a way that the two words to be blended tend t o consist of an equal number of
morae. He further notes that the word that results tends to involve the same number
of morae as the target word, or the word which was intended by the speaker. The first
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H. Ktibozoiio
259
TABLE4
Switch point in blend errors (reanalyLed)
No. of instances (%)
Switch point
hlora/Syllable boundary
52 (71%)
hlora boundary that is not
syllable boundary
21 (29%)
73 (100%)
Total
TABLE5
Length relation measured in terms of the mora
Pattern
No. of instances (%)
I.
A B=XY=AY
11.
AB=XYfAY
0 (0%)
111.
AB#XY=AY
35 (46%)
IV.
A B=AYf XY
6
(8%)
V.
A B#XYf AY
5
(7%)
Total
30 (39%)
76 (1 00%)
of these observations cannot be supported by the present analysis. This can be seen from
the result in Table 5 , which shows the length relation between the two words to be
blended as well as the relation between the two words and the resultant word. ('=' and
'it'mean, r&pectively, that the two elements are equal and unequal in mora length.)
There are only 30 instances (39% out of the total) - patterns I and 11 -in which two
words of an identical mora length were blended. What is crucial, instead, is the length
relation between the resultant word, A Y, and one of the words blended (patterns I, 111,
and IV). To be more specific, the resultant word tends to have the same mora length
as the word represented as XY in (13), whose non-initial part is combined with the initial
part of another word. This pattern, or the patterns I and I11 combined, accounts for 65
instances (85%) of the whole data which outnumber the cases that are accounted for
by the combination of the two patterns I and IV (i.e., 36 instances, or 47%). Exceptions
to this rule - patterns IV and V - are mostly blends of morphologically complex words
such as compound nouns, adjectives, and verbs," in which a morphological factor of
lo
These eleven exceptions include four cases involving compound nouns, two cases
each of adjective-adjective and adverb-adverb blends, and one verb-verb blend,
leaving only two cases in which simplex nouns were blended.
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Mora and Syllable Stnrcture iii Japanese
260
some kind can have exerted some effect. The observation that the resultant word agrees
in mora length with the word whose initial part is omitted can be stated as (16).
(1 6) In AB/XY -t AY,
XY and AY involve the same number of morae
The observation stated in (16) implies that there is an agreement in mora length
between A and X , the initial part of the first word which remains intact and the initial
part of the second word which is omitted. This implication can be stated as a condition
on the blend process, which can be formulated as in (17) and is illustrated in (1 8).
(17) InAB/XY -, AY,
A and X involve the same number of morae
(18) (=(12))
a. za.a.(sa.i)
(ra.a.)me.n
-f
or
za .(a. sa. i)
(ra.)a.me.n
b. pe.ni.(i)
(pe.n.)su
-t
c. to.ma.(re)
(su t o .)p .pu
.
2a.a.me.n
-,2a.a.me.n
pe.ni.su
-+
to. ma .p .pu
This consequence raises a question of why the resultant words involve the same
number of morae as the words whose initial part is omitted. This recalls the second
remark made by Terao, that the word that results from blending involves the same
number o f morae as the target word which the speaker intended. Under this analysis,
the second word XU, is assumed as the target word, and the rules in (16) and (17) can
be characterized as a constraint governing the phonological length of the intended and
resultant words so that the phonological length of the target word is maintained.
Given this line of generalization in terms of the mora, one may naturally ask if the
syllable can provide as plausible an account of the length rules. Table 6 compares the
two types of analysis with respect to the length implication stated in (17) for the 76
errors in the corpus.
The results in this table suggest that the length rule in question is properly handled
at a substantially higher rate by the mora than by the syllable. The discrepancy between
the mora analysis and the syllable analysis largely represents the amount of data in
Table 3 that can be handled by the mora but not by the syllable.
The length rules in (16) and (17) may not be predicted a priori by any model of
psychological or linguistic processing, but it seems worth noting that blends in Japanese
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H. Kubozono
26 1
TABLE6
Comparison of the two analyses with respect t o the
implication in (1 7)
Mora
Syllable
can
6 3 (83%)
42 (55%)
cannot
13 (17%)
34 (45%)
Total
76 (1 00%)
76 (1 00%)
show a certain pattern in length relation and that such a pattern can best be generalized
in terms of the unit corresponding to the mora.
Blends iri word fonnatioii
Before discussing the implication of the foregoing discussion for the internal organization of the syllable, it may be worth describing blends in word formation as a potential
source of evidence for the reality of the mora. Arguably an intentional counterpart of
blend errors, blends in word formation follow essentially the same linguistic patterns,
both morphological and phonological, as blends in speech errors. In my corpus there are
22 word formation blends which follow the morphological pattern in (17), including
those in (19) (cf. Appendix 2).’
(19) a. go-ri-ra
‘gorilla’ / ku-zi-ra ‘whale’
(an imaginary animal)
-,go-zi-ra
b. kja-be-tu
3
c. pi-a-no
+
d. ta-bi
‘cabbage’ / ni.n-zi.n ‘carrot’
kja-bk-zi.n (name of a medicine)
‘piano’ / ha.a-mo-ni-ka
‘harmonica’
pi-a-ni-ka
(a musical instrument)
‘Japanese socks’ / s0.k-ku-su
‘socks’
ta-bi.k-ku-su
(a brand name of socks)
3
The phonological structure of these blends is ambiguous in all but two instances,
which can only be interpreted by the mora, e.g., (19d).I2 However, all the blends in the
Exceptions to the pattern include the following: AB/BY ABY, e.g., tanaka (personal
name)/nakasone (personal name) -c tunakasorze. Moreover, as in the case of blends in
speecherrors, blends in word formation involve two words which belong to an identical
syntactic category, most typically nouns.
-f
** Ambiguous
instances include (19a), which can be interpreted in at least three ways:
go-r(i-ra) 1 (ku-z)i-ra, or go-(ri-ra) 1 (ku-)zi-ra, the latter permitting two interpretations, one implying switch at mora boundaries and the other switch at syllable
boundaries.
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Mora a i d Syllable Stnichrre ill Japanese
262
TABLE7
Switch point in blends in word formation
No. of instances (76)
Switch point
hlora boundary
22 (100%)
Syllable boundary
18 (82%)
Onset-Peak boundary
1 0 (45%)
22 (100%)
Total
TABLE8
Switch point in blends in word formation (reanalyzed)
Switch point
Mora/Syllable boundary
hlora boundary that is not
syllable boundary
Total
No. of instances (%)
18 (82%)
4 (18%)
22 (100%)
corpus can be seen as cases in which the two component words are split and subsequently
combined at a mora boundary while other analyses cannot handle the data as well as the
mora (e.g., (19d)). These analyses are compared in Table 7. Moreover, the same data,
when reinterpreted as in Table 8, show that blends in word formation occur at mora
boundaries largely irrespective of whether or not the boundaries correspond with syllable
b o ~ n d a r i e s . ' ~The results in these tables are essentially identical to those obtained
for blends in speech errors (Tables 3 and 4).
I n addition to this, the mora-based analysis enables us to make a generalization
concerning the phonological length of the elements involved in blends in word formation:
Given the morphological pattern in (13), A and X generally consist of an equal number
of morae, so that the rule in (17) constrains blends in word formation as well as those in
speech errors. Although this generalization admits of a few exceptions like (19c) and
(19d), it is nevertheless worth emphasizing that most of the instances follow this
l3
Switches at mora/syllable boundaries account for more than threequarters of the
data in Table 8, but the difference is far from being statistically significant in a
binomial test,
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H. Kubozoizo
263
TABLE9
Comparison of the two analyses with respect to the
implication in (1 7)
hlora
Syllable
17 (77%)
12 (55%)
cannot
5 (23%)
10 (45%)
Total
2 2 (1 00%)
22 (100%)
can
pattern,I4 while the syllable analysis cannot account for it in a satisfactory manner
(cf. Table 9).
Given the line of argument that has been put forward, it may be objected that the
evidence from word formation is not convincing because of possible influences of
spellings, which are more o r less mora-based in Japanese. Since two of the three orthographic systems for writing the language - hiruguiia and kufukuiiu - use the mora as the
basic unit,” it is possible t o assume that people just select whole orthographic units
from each word in this arguably intentional process of blending. There are, however,
several noteworthy facts which weaken, if not totally invalidate, the account based on
orthography in favor of the mora analysis.
One such fact is that one-to-one correspondences d o not necessarily hold between
orthographic units in the kuizu syllabary and mora-sized phonological units, since some
morae are symbolized by two 1etters.16*17 If blends were made on the basis of orthol4
The exceptions can be attributed to some other independent principles, which reinforces our hypothesis that blends in word formation are also subject to the condition in (17). For example, preference of the form piuniku to piumoniko in (19c) is
probably attributable to the fact that a four-mora sequence is the most preferred
length of words in Japanese.
l5
The third orthographic system is kanji (Chinese characters), which is logographic.
l6
hlorae involving the palatal glide, /CjV/, are represented in writing by the sequence of
two letters representing /Ci/ and /yV/ respectively, e.g., /tju/ = /ti/ -F /yu/. The second
letter of these sequences is written in a small letter, but this does not invalidate the
argument developed here since the moraic obstruent, conventionally symbolized as
/Q/, is also represented by a small letter. The fact that /CjV/ and /CVQ/ are counted
as one and two morae, respectively, while both are represented b y two letters points
to a discrepancy between the phonological unit ‘mora’ and the orthographic unit
‘kana’
It may be worth adding that people are taught about letters but not about the mora
at school, much less about the differences between the two types of unit described
here. This fact precludes the possibility that people add overt grammatical knowledge
in the blend process.
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264
Mora and Syllable Stnrctirre bi Japanese
graphy and not mora-sized phonological units, we would get forms like kja. zi. iz for
(19b) according to the length rule in (17). The fact that no such form actually exists in
the corpus suggests that the orthography-based analysis cannot account for the length
rule as effectively as the mora-based analysis.
Another noteworthy fact that constitutes potential evidence against the assumed
dependency of the word formation process on orthography concerns a parallel between
Japanese and English data. As will be discussed later, blends in word formation and in
speech errors show an essentially identical phonological pattern in English; both take
the onset-peak boundary as the most preferred switch point, suggesting that one and
the same strategy is used in the intentional blend process and in its spontaneous counterpart. Given the fact that a similar relationship is observed between the two types of blend
in Japanese, it is probably reasonable t o assume that the intentional word formation
process is controlled by the same strategy as the spontaneous speech error process in
Japanese just as it is in English." After all, any explanation on the basis of orthography
complicates a situation that could otherwise be explained in a rather simple manner and,
hence, it is probably reasonable to assume that influences of spellings, if any, are not so
significant as to negate the relevance of the word formation data for the discussion of
psycholinguistic representations.
SYLLABLE
CONSTITUENCY
Having presented the evidence for the mora, let us now consider the implications
of the mora analysis as t o the syllable constituency of Japanese. The first question that
emerges in addressing this issue concerns the reality of the unit corresponding t o the
syllable. While the foregoing discussion argued that the mora is linguistically relevant
in Japanese, this does not preclude the possibility that the syllable is also a relevant
unit. On the contrary, the mora analysis of the speech error data developed so far is also
suggestive of the psychological reality of the syllable, the linguistic relevance of which
has already been demonstrated in the literature. As noted in the discussion of the errors
in (10) and (11) above, for example, vowels and consonants interact only in the final
positions of long syllables. Without some unit that corresponds t o the syllable, there is
no way to define this constraint in Japanese phonology."
The reality of the syllable is substantiated more readily by the finding that there is
a strong constraint on inter-mora interactions. According to my previous study in which
'
l9
Stated conversely, if we assume that blends in word formation are dependent basically
o n orthography, we will be obliged to assume that the spontaneous speech error process
is also dependent on orthography; or, otherwise, we would have to somehow explain
why the word formation process in Japanese is dependent on orthography while its
speech error counterpart is not, and why such an analysis is necessary (or possible) in
Japanese but not in English.
J. Stemberger (personal communication) suggests that the unit 'syllable' can be dis-
pensed with in a feature analysis wherein segments are specified with the independent
segmental feature of syllabicity. This seems to be a complex theoretical issue, which
is beyond the scope of this paper.
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H. Kubozono
265
TABLE 10
Replacement of non-syllabic morae
Substitution
75
8
Transposition
4
1
79 (90%)
Tot a1
9 (10%)
88 errors involving the replacement of a non-syllabic mora were analyzed, the vast
majority of errors involve replacement of a non-syllabic mora by another non-syllabic
mora, illustrated in (20a), while replacement by a syllabic mora, illustrated in (20b),
accounts for only nine instances (cf. Kubozono, 1985).20 The statistical result is given
in Table lo?*
(20) a. zju.u-go
pa.a-se.n-to
-+
zju.u-go
pa.rt-se.n-to
(=(3c))
b. ko-ku-ro.0
do.0-ro.0 -+ ko-ku-ro.0
do-kii-ro.0
‘Kokuroo and Dooroo’ (names of railway workers’ labor unions)
Since there is reportedly no phonotactic or mora-level constraint that prohibits the
latter type of replacement in Japanese, and, moreover, the syllabic mora is by far the
more common type of mora in the language, as noted before, it follows that moraic
errors obey a structural law with respect to syllable place such that they tend t o involve
morae of the same type. Without some unit that corresponds t o the syllable, there is n o
way t o distinguish between the two types of mora, and, accordingly, to account for
the fact in Table 10.
Having seen the argument that the syllable as well as the mora is supported by
evidence from speech errors as well as by purely linguistic evidence, let us now address
the questiofi of syllable constituency, that is, how these two units relate to each other.
Specifically, given the data in the preceding section, one is naturally inclined to ask if
there is any evidence in Japanese at all for the syllable unit corresponding to the rhyme,
the existence of which is supported in English and other languages (see, for example,
Crompton, 1982, and Fudge, 1987,among recent works). Since the reality of the mora and
2o
Meanwhile, interaction between two syllabic morae is very common, regardless of
whether they belong to (a) the same syllable type (e.g., to-ri-ya-me-ru
‘cancel’
to-ri-ya-ri-ru),
or (b) different types (e.g., a-ra-bu-zi.n
‘an Arabic’ + a-ra-zibu .n).
-+
21
The data analyzed in Table 10 include ambiguous as well as unambiguous instances
for both of the two types of error..
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Mora arid Syllable Stnictlrre in Japariese
266
that of the rhyme are apparently incompatible with each other, with the former implying
cohesiveness between the onset and the peak and the latter cohesiveness between the
peak and the coda, this question is interesting from the standpoint of theoretical
phonology, in view of the recent controversy concerning the reality and status of the
rhyme in phonological theory (e.g., Clements and Keyser, 1983 vs. Fudge, 1987).
As has been mentioned repeatedly, speech errors in Japanese often involve the splitting
of syllables. With just a few exceptions, these splits can best be interpreted as taking place
between the peak and the following element of the syllable, as illustrated by the blends
in (21).
(21) a.
b.
Syll
n
c VI c
Syll
A
c VIV
e.g. (12c) su-tolp-pu
e.g. (12b) pe-nili
The fact that this type of split occurs indeed very commonly in Japanese gives the
impression that Japanese exhibits quite different patterns from other languages. In
English, for example, it is well known (cf. Stemberger, 1983; Fudge, 1987) that the
onset-peak boundary is the most preferred switch point, which is generally taken as
strong evidence for the reality of the rhyme in the language. According t o Stemberger
(1983: 22);there are 53 errors in his corpus where the peak and the coda are misordered
together, whereas only four errors involve misordering the onset and the peak together.
Similarly, Fudge (1987) points out, through analysis of several types of speech error in
English listed in the appendix to Fromkin (1973), that cases involving a split between the
onset and the rhyme, represented in (22a), outnumber those involving a split between
the peak and the coda, represented in (22b), by about four t o one. Fudge uses this and
other pieces of evidence to argue against Clements and Keyser’s (1983) refutation of
the onset-rhyme syllable model in (7). This point is further confirmed by my own
analysis of the 65 blend errors listed in the same appendix analyzed by Fudge, which
yielded the result given in Table 11. All in all, while many errors permit more than one
interpretation, the pattern in (22a) accounts for the majority of the cases analyzed, and
just a few cases unambiguously follow the pattern in (22b):’
The fact that the pattern
in (22a) is by far the most common in English implies that the onset-peak boundary is
significant within the English syllable, thus justifying the notion of rhyme as a syllable
. unit.
22
Note that Crompton (1982) suggests that the pattern in (22b) is more common than
than in ( 2 2 ~ 1 which
,
is different from the result in Table 11. Interesting is the analysis
reported by MacKay (1972), who shows that syllable-boundaries are a more preferred
switch point in German blends.
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H. Kubozoiio
267
TABLE11
Switch point in English blend errors
(ambiguous and unambiguous instances combined)
No. of instances (%)
Switch point
Onset-Peak boundary
44 (68%)
Peak-Coda boundary
12 (18%)
Syllable boundary
22 (34%)
Total
65 (1 00%)
(22) a. switch at onset-peak boundary
cl(ose) / (n)ear
clear
+
b. switch at peak-coda boundary
swvi(tched) / (cha)nged + swinged
c. switch at syllable boundary
pop-(u-lar) / (pub-)lic -t pop-lic
The evidence from English errors contrasts with the evidence we saw in Table 3, which
showed that the onset-peak boundary is the least preferred switch point in Japanese
blends. What this means is that, unlike equivalent phenomena in English and possibly
other languages, speech error data in Japanese provide no substantial evidence for the
existence of the rhyme as a syllable unit, thus reinforcing the view expressed by
Kubozono (1985) that the traditional analysis of the syllable into onset and rhyme does
not represent a universal syllable structure, as often implied in the literature (cf. Fudge,
1987).
Comparable observations can be made about blends in word formation. According
t o my analysis of the blends reported by Wentworth (1934) (cf. Kubozono, in preparation), there are 143 cases (out of the total of about 3600) where two monosyllabic
words were blended.23 The morphological pattern in (13) accounts for 107 (75%) of
these, which show the four different patterns in (23) as t o the switch point implied.
(23) a. switch at onset-peak boundary
sn(ake) / (sh)ark -+ snark
23
In this study I only analyzed blends of two monosyllabic words in order to see which
switch point within the syllable is preferred most of all.
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Mora and Syllable Stnrcture in Japanese
268
TABLE12
Switch point in blends in English word formation
(unambiguous instances only)
No. of instances (%)
Switch point
Onset-Peak boundary
49 (77%)
Peak-Coda boundary
12 (19%)
Within the onset
1 (2%)
Within the coda
1 (2%)
Total
6 3 (1 00%)
TABLE13
Switch point in blends in English word formation
(ambiguous and unambiguous instances combined)
Switch point
No. of instances (%)
Onset-Peak boundary
89 (83%)
Peak-Coda boundary
4 2 (39%)
Within the onset
2 0 (19%)
Within the coda
Total
9
(8%)
107 (1 00%)
(23) b. switch at peak-coda boundary
boo(m) / (hoi)st -,boost
c. switch within the onset
sc(a1e) / (c)limb -, sclimb
d. switch within the coda
slan(g) / (ta1)k -, dank
The 107 instances which follow the morphological pattern in (13) include both
ambiguous and unambiguous instances with respect t o the switch point implied, with
the former accounting for 43 instances (40%) and the latter for 6 4 instances (6%).
Table 12 summarizes the frequencies of the four patterns as regards the unambiguous
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H. Kubozoiio
269
instances. Ambiguous instances exhibit an essentially identical tendency, yielding the
result in Table 13 when combined with unambiguous instances (with ambiguous cases
counted twofold or threefold, as in Table 11). The results in these two'tables are
essentially the same as those obtained for speech error data, showing the onset-peak
boundary as the most preferred switch point in English.
A comparison of the results in Table 7 with those in Tables 12 and 13 suggests
that the onset-rhyme boundary plays little or no part in the blend process in Japanese.
It may be objected again that the evidence from word formation is not convincing
because of a possible confound with orthography, 24 but the fact nevertheless remains
that the data from the word formation process d o not provide evidence for the rhyme
in Japanese as they do in English.
The impression that the rhyme plays n o significant role in Japanese is reinforced by
evidence from other sources, In fact, while various linguistic phenomena supposedly
provide evidence for the rhyme in English and other languages, n o evidence can be
adduced for this syllable unit from any analogous phenomena in Japanese. Let us
consider, for instance, distributional constraints holding between syllable constituents.
In English, there is reportedly a set of general constraints that hold between the peak
and the coda, whereas constraints between the onset and the peak are relatively weak
(cf. Fudge, 1969, 1987). In Japanese, by contrast, co-occurrence restrictions operating
between onset and peak are at least as strong as those holding between peak and coda.
For example, combinations of the palatal consonant lyl and the following vowel are
highly restricted, and so are those of the labial consonant Iwl and the following vowel.
This is shown in (24).
Comparable observations can be made about the relationship holding between the
palatal glide /j/ and the neighboring segments, which is subject t o two types of COoccurrence restriction. First, the relation between the glide and the following vowel is
restricted in such a way that the glide does not appear before the vowel lil (e-g., */kjil,
*/mji/). Second, the palatal glide cannot be combined with the two consonants /w/ and
/y/, with the result that forms like lwvjal, Iwjol, /yja/, /yju/ do not exist. If the palatal
glide is analyzed as part of the onset, as is done by Joo'o (1977), the first restriction
24
This objection deserves special consideration in discussing the reality of the rhyme,
because unlike switches at mora boundariesand syllable boundaries, switches at onsetrhyme boundaries create letters which appeared in neither source word in the Japanese
writing system: In the arguably conscious and intentional processes of word f o m a tion, it is unlikely that speakers would demonstrate the assumed reality of the rhyme
at this cost.
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270
Mora arid SylIable Stnrctirre in Japanese
is seen as a constraint holding between the onset and the peak whereas the second
restriction can be defined as a constraint holding within the onset constituent. If, on the
other hand, the palatal glide is seen as part of the peak, the second restriction is to be
defined as a constraint holding between the onset and the peak, with the first restriction
seen as a constraint holding within the peak constituent. Whichever analysis is taken with
respect to the location of the glide within the syllable, the fact remains that there is a
strong distributional constraint holding between the onset and the peak in Japanese.
In contrast, there are not many analogous constraints that hold between the peak
and the coda. In fact, there are, as far as I can see, only two contraints, one of which
is the restriction between complex (long or diphthongal) vowels and the consonant in
the coda: While no restriction apparently holds between short vowels and the following
consonant, sequences of / C W C / (e.g., /waatto/, /wain/, /rein/) are only permitted in
recently borrowed, words and onomatopoeic expression^?^ The other co-occurrence
restriction holding between the peak and the coda in Japanese is the constraint between
the vowel and the following consonant. In this syllable-final position, voiced obstruents
are permitted only in borrowed words (e.g., /baddzi/ ‘badge’ and /beddo/ ‘bed’) while
voiceless obstruents as well as nasals are free from such a constraint: E.g., ten ‘heaven’
and sekkeii ‘soap’ but not *teggen.
In addition t o the phenomena relating to distributional constraints, data from
Japanese word games and rhyming traditions provide a different insight from equivalent
phenomena in English as regards the internal structure of the syllable. In English, on the
one hand, many word games reported in the literature such as ‘Cockney rhyming slang’
(cf. Fudge, 1987) imply a major split between the onset and the peak. Likewise, the
rhyme is an indispensable notion in the traditions of English poetry although there may
be a slight difference between the notion of rhyme used in the literature and that used
in linguistics. In any case, the fact that the rhyme is an indispensable notion in these
traditions serves as evidence supporting the peak-coda cohesiveness in English.
The same notion is in no way supported by the equivalent phenomena in Japanese.
As for word games, there seems to be none in which a split between the onset and the
rhyme is implied. Take siritori (meaning ‘tail catching’), for example, which is the most
traditional and popular word game enjoyed even by children who have not learned how
to write or read. In this game, one speaker is supposed t o produce a word that starts
with a mora :dentical to the last mora of the word given by the previous speaker: Thus,
the word kui ‘shell-fish’ is followed by iti ‘one’, which, in turn, is followed by tikara
‘power’ and so forth. What is relevant in this and other games in linguistic terms is the
unit corresponding to the mora, and not the division between the onset and the peak as
in English. The same holds true of traditions in poetry. The traditional forms of Japanese
poetry such as tanka and haiku are essentially mora-based in that phonological length
measured in terms of the mora counts most (cf. hlcCawley, 1978). As far as is generally
25
Combinations of a complex vowel and a syllable-final consonant are often disfavored
even in borrowed words and onomatopoeic expressions, as is evidenced by shortening
of vowels in such words as renzi (< lreinzil ‘range’),gurando (< lguraundol ‘ground’)
and konbiihu (< lkoonbiihul ‘corn beef‘).
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H. Kubozono
27 1
known, there is no form of verse in Japanese in which either the onset or the rhyme
plays a crucial part.26
All in all, there is no phenomenon in Japanese in which the division between the
onset and the peak plays any significant role, while it seems t o be always the case that the
mora plays a crucial role.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this paper I have analyzed various linguistic phenomena relating to the mora, with
main emphasis on the evidence from speech errors. Various lines of evidence that have
been presented suggest that a unit corresponding t o the mora i s essential for significant
generalizations of linguistic phenomena in Japanese, whereas syllable boundaries do not
seem so relevant, nor does the notion of rhyme apparently play any significant role. Each
o f the analyses which I have presented for speech error data may be regarded as suggestive
rather then definitive. It can be said, however, that these analyses, when put together into
a single picture, point to the relevance of the mora and mora boundary.
A second point of interest that emerges from the foregoing discussion is that there
is no evidence for the syllable unit ‘rhyme’ which is often implied as a universal syllable
constituent. Admittedly, absence of evidence for a linguistic construct in one language
does not negate its relevance in other languages, but the lack of evidence from Japanese
suggests that the same may be true of so-called ‘mora languages’ in general. In other
words, the Japanese data suggest that the rhyme is not a universal constituent of the
syllable, which seems to be a point worth special attention in discussing the organization
of the syllable in phonological theory.
Apart from the discussion of the mora and syllable structure, it is interesting to note
that Japanese and English show striking similarities in the linguistic structures of blends.
The two languages show a morphological similarity, for example, in that blends in speech
errors and in word formation follow one and the same pattern whereby the initial part of
one word is combined with the non-initial part of another.
A similar observation can be made about the phonological patterns if different syllable
structures are postulated for the two languages. That is, if the onset-rhyme model is
adopted for the syllable structure in English, it can be said that the phonological patterns
underlying various processes in English conform to the internal structure of the syllable.
26
Another potential source of evidence against the rhyme in Japanese is the study of
stuttering. To my knowledge, the literature on Japanese stuttering reports no instance
in which monosyllabic words like f e n ‘heaven’ and kai ‘shellfish’ are split between
the onset and the peak. When there is a break within a syllable, it generally occurs
between the nuclear vowel and the following segment, yielding such segmentations
as [tel-In] and [kal-[i] (cf. hloriyama and Ozawa, 1975). This observation has
been confirmed by my recent communication with Yoko Wakaba, an expert on
stuttering in Japanese. Although details remain to be confirmed, these observations
seem to point t o a difference in the way English and Japanese stutterers stutter with
respect to syllable disruption, providing additional support for the claim made in this
paper.
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272
Mora arid Syllable Structure in Japanese
Likewise, given the mora model as the syllable structure of Japanese, it can be generalized
that the processes in the language are equally constrained by the internal constituent
structure of the unit. The generalization that linguistic processes are thus strictly
constrained by the syllable-internal structure in the two languages is missed if the rhyme
is assumed as a universal syllable unit. hloreover, the claim that two independent
languages are subject to essentially identical linguistic conditions squares with the idea,
put forward by Kubozono (I988), that the phonological compound formation rules in
English and Japanese are subject to remarkably similar linguistic constraints although
they differ considerably in phonetic/phonological contents.
Finally, it may be worth emphasizing that, in both Japanese and English, the two
types of blend process discussed in this paper -in speech errors and in word formation follow essentially the same morphological and phonological patterns. This suggests that
the same strategies are employed in the production of speech errors as in the process of
word formation, which, in turn, supports the long-standing belief that speech errors
provide an important and useful source of data for the investigation of language structure
as well as the mechanisms underlying speech production and language processing.
(Received September 22, 1988; accepted November 22, 1989)
REFERENCES
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BOOhlER, D.S.,and LAVER, J. (1968). Slips of the tongue. British Journal of Disorders of Conztnunication, 3-1, 2-12; reprinted in V. Fromkin (ed.) (1973), Speech Errors as Lilzgztistic
Evidence (pp. 120-131). The Hague: hlouton.
CLEMENTS, G.N., and REYSER, S.J. (1983). CV Phonofogy. (Linguistic Inquiry hlonographs, 9).
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CROMPTON, A. (1982). Syllable and segments in speech production. In A. Cutler (ed.),Slipsof the
Tongue and Language Production (pp. 109- 162). Amsterdam: hlouton.
FROhlKIN, V. (1973). The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances In v. Fromkin (ed.),
Speeeli Errors as Linguistic Evidence (pp. 215-242). The Hague: hlouton.
FUDGE, E. (1969). Syllables. Journal of Linguistics, 5,253-286.
FUDGE, E. (1987). Branching structure within the syllable. Journal oflinguistics, 23,359-377.
HAN, h1.S. (1962). Japanese Phonology. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.
JOO’O, H. (1977). Gendai nihongo no onin (Phonology of modern Japanese). In S. Ohno and T
Shibata (eds.), Nilzongo 5, (pp. 107-146). Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten.
KUBOZONO, H. (1985). Speech errors and syllable structure. Lingguistics and Philology, 6,220-243.
KUBOZONO, H. (1987). On the phonetics and phonology of the accent-induced F,, fall in Japanese.
Linguistics and Philology, 7. 1-22.
KUBOZONO, H. (1988). Constraints on phonological compound formation. Eizglish Linguistics, 5,
150-1 6 9.
KUBOZONO, II. (in preparation). Phonological conditions on blends in English.
LlCCAWLEY, J. (1978). What is a tone language? In V. Fromkin (ed.), Tone: A Linguistic Survey
(pp. 113-131). New York: Academic Press.
hlACKAY, D. (1972). The structure of words and syllables: Evidence from errors in speech. Cognitive
PsycIdogy, b, 210-227.
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hlORIYAhtA, ?I. and OZAWA, E. (1975). Tiyusita kituonzi itirei no gengosyouzyou no suii (Linguistic changes of a cured child stutterer). Tyokakugeiigo syogai, 4, 101-1 13.
PIKE, K.L. (1955/67). Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Humaii Behavior.
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TERAO, Y. (1984). Kongoo taipu no iiayarnari ni tuite (On blends). Tsitkuba IVorkiiigPupers irz Lirzguistics, 3, 15-31 (Linguistic Circle, The University of Tsukuba.)
TONOIKE, S. (1983). Goyoo n o sinri gengogaku (Psycholinguistic aspects of speech errors). Geiigo,
12,52-61.
VINCENT, N. (1986). Constituency and syllable structure. In J. Durand (ed.), Deperiderzcy arid
Noii-linear Phonology (pp. 305-318). London: Croom Helm.
WENTWORTH, H. (1934). Blend-words in English. Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University.
APPENDIX 1
Blend errors
The following are the 76 blend errors, arranged in random order, which were analyzed
in the present study. The practices used in the main text are also employed in the transcriptions here: /-/ represents syllable boundaries, which are also mora boundaries by
definition while /./ represents mora boundaries that do not coincide with syllable
boundaries.
AB
1. to-ma-re
‘stop’ (imperative)
I
XY
+
AY
su -t 0. p -pu
‘stop’
t o-ma .p-pu
ho. n-da-na
‘bookshelf
t 0.n -d a -n a
3. mu.u-do
‘mood’
hu-n-i-ki
‘atmosphere’
mu .n-i-ki
4. ta-ku-si.i
‘taxi’
ha.i-ya.a
‘hired-car’
5. ta.i-da
t a. i-ma
2. to -da-na
‘cupboard’
‘laziness’
’
‘neglect’
.n
.
ta .i-ya a
ta .i-da. n
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Mora and SyIIabIe Structure in Japanese
2 74
si-ki-bo.0
‘baton’
ku-ra-ma
‘Kurama’
6 . ta-ku-to
‘baton’
7. ki -b u -ne
‘Kibune’
8. so-ra-su
‘avert’
9. to. 0 -kU
‘far’
10. do.0-si-te
‘why’
11. si-ta
‘did’
12. me-do
‘prospect’
13. he-b a-ri-t
u -ku
‘stick’
14. he-ru-pu
‘help’
15. pe-ni.i
‘penny’
16. za.a-sa.i
‘Chinese pickles’
17. ya-ma-to
‘Kuroneko Yamato’
so-gu-ra-ka-su
na.n-de
‘how come’
si-te-na.i
‘did not (do)’
me-bo-si
‘guess’
ko-bi-ri-tu-ku
‘adhere’
se-ru-hu
‘self
pea-su
‘pence’
ra.a-me.n
‘Chinese noodle’
ku-ro-ne-ko
d0.n-de
na-ka-ya-ma
‘Nakayama’
19. ko.0-s0.O
‘conflict’
ta.i-ri-tu
‘opposition’
kjo. o-rjo-ku
‘cooperation’
sa-sa-ni-si-ki
‘Sasanishiki’
ko-si-hi-ka-ri
‘Koshhikari’
zi-zjo.0
‘circumstance’
nja.n-ko
‘kitty’
22. sa-sa-ni-si-ki
‘Sasanishiki’
23. tu-go .O
‘convenience’
24. ne-ko
‘cat’
ki-ra-ma
(= place names)
ha-gu-ra-ka-su
‘evade’
so. o-de-mo
‘so much’
18. se-ko
‘Seko’
20. yu.u-kO.0
‘friendship’
21. ko-si-hi-ka-ri
Xoshihikari’
ta-ku-bo.0
t 0.o -d e-mo
si-ta-na.i
me-do-si
he-bi-ri-tu-ku
he-ru-hu
pe-ni-su
za.a-me.n
ya-ma-ne-ko
(= a company name)
se-ko-ya-ma
(= names of athletes)
ko. o-ri-tu
yu.u-rjo-ku
ko-si-ni-si-ki
(= brand names of rice)
sa-sa-hi-ka-ri
(= brand names o f rice)
tu-zjo .o
ne.n-ko
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275
Kiibozono
.i
25. hi-to-tu
‘one’
i .s-sa .i
‘one year (old)’
26. yu.u-ka
‘Yuka’
ri-ri .i
‘Lily’
27. tjo .t-to
‘Say’
28. mi-ni-ku.i
‘ugly’
ko-ra
‘Hey’
mi-gu-ru-si.i
‘indecent’
29. hi-sa-bi-sa
‘after a long time’
hi-sa-si-bu-ri
‘after a long time’
hi-sa-bi-si-bu-ri
30. ka .n-ri-sjo-ku
‘managerial officer’
e-ri .i-t o
‘elite’
ka-ri .i-to
31. u-ra
‘reverse side’
u-e
‘upside’
su-ba-ra-si. i
‘wonderful’
i-ki-nu-ki
‘break’ (<breath + pulling)
u-re
32. su-ba-ya.i
‘swift’
33. ho-ne-ya-su-me
‘break’ (<bone -t rest)
hi-to-sa
yu-ri. i
(= girls’ names)
tjo-ra
mi-ni-ku-ru-si.
su-ba-ya-ra-si
i
.i
ho-ne-nu-ki
34. o-te-tu-da.i
‘help’
o-tu-ka.i
o-te-tu-ka.
i
‘errand’
to-mo-ka-zu
mo -mo -ka-zu
35. mo-mo-e
‘hlomoe’ (= singer’s name) ‘Tomokazu’ (hlomoe’s husband)
36. zjo.0-ho.0
‘information’
zjo. 0-ro. n
37. k0.n-do
‘next time’
hjo .o-ro .n
‘comment’
2ja.a
‘bye’
38. ho.0-se.i
‘Hosei’ (University)
39. be-su-to-te .n
‘Best ten’
se .n-sju.u
h o 0-sju .u
‘Senshu’ (University)
t0.p-pu-te.n
be .p-pu-te .n
(= names of TV programs)
‘Top ten’
40. ni-ho.n
‘Japan’
41. ko-ku-mo-tu
‘grain’
42. yu-ta
‘Uta’ (State)
43. o-to-k0.p-po-sa
‘manliness’
na-to.o
‘NATO’
sjo-ku-rjo.0
‘food’
ne-ba-ta
‘Nevada’ (State)
o-to-ko-ra-si-sa
‘manliness’
k o .n-zja
.
ni-to.0
ko-ku-rjo
.o
yu-ka-ta
o-to-ko.
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p-po-ra-si-sa
Mora arid Syllable Srnicnire in Japanese
276
44. u-e-no-mi-ya
‘Uenomiya’
hu-zi-no-mi-ya-ki-ta
u-e-no-mi-ya-ki-ta
‘Fujinomiya-kita’ (= names of high schools)
45. ko.0-sju
‘offense and defense’
to.0-da
‘pitching and batting’
ko.0-da
46. ni-tja-ku
‘runner-up’
i.t-tja-ku
‘the first in the race’
ni-t-tja-ku
47. ta.i-si-te
‘against’
ka .n-si-te
‘concerning’
ta .n-si-te
48. o-ma-ti
‘wait’
ma-te
‘wait’ (imperative)
o-ma-te
49. u-e-di.n-gu-be-ru
’wedding bell’
u-e-di.n-gu-ma.a-ti
‘wedding march’
u-e-di.n-gu-be-ti
50. o-ri-ga-mi
‘origami’ (<folded paper)
ki -r i-e
o-ri-e
‘kirie’ (<cut picture) (= paper arts)
5 1. ko-do-mo
‘child’
o-to-na
‘adult’
ko-do-na
52. ma-sa-ki
‘hlasaki’ (= boy’s name)
se.i-ko
‘Seiko’ (= girl’s name)
ma-sa-ko
53. hu-t a-ri
‘two persons’
hi-to-ri
‘one person’
hu-to-ri
54. ki.n-tja.n
‘Kin-chan’
ha-gi-mo-to-sa.n
ki.n-sa .n
‘hk. Hagimoto’ (< Kin Hagimoto)
55. so-bi-e-to
‘Soviet’
so-re .n
‘Soviet Union’
so-be.n
56. pa.n-hu-re .t-to
‘pamphlet’
pu -ro-gu -ra-mu
‘program’
pa. n-gu-ra-mu
57. ze-mi
‘seminar’
se-mi-na. a
‘seminar’
ze-mi-na
.a
‘genius’
si .n-d 0.o
‘God’s child’
te .n-do .o
59. kja-ra-me-ru
‘caramel’
tjo-ko-re.e-to
‘chocolate’
kja-ra-me-e-to
60. su-ta-n-do
‘stand’
su-ra.n-do
61. ke-zu-ri-bu-si
‘dried-bonito plane’
gu-ra. n-do
‘ground’
ka-tu-o-bu-si
‘dried bonito’
62. o-tu-ka-re-sa-ma
‘(you) must be tired’
o-ka .e-ri-na-sa.i
‘welcome home’
o-tu-ka-re-na-sa.
58. te.n-sa.i
ke-tu-o-bu-si
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i
277
H. Krrbozoiio
63. de-ki
‘result’
ta-ti-a-ga-ri
‘starting condition’
de-ki-a-ga-ri
64. ne-ra.t-te-i-ru
‘is aiming’
ni-ra .n-de-i-ru
‘is glaring’
ne-ra .n-de-i-ru
65. ku-re -ru
‘give’
mo-ra.e-ru
‘be given’
ku-ra.e-ru
66. o-ni-gi-ri
‘rice ball’
(< o + nigiri ‘to grasp’)
ni-gi-ri-me -si
‘rice ball’ (<grasped rice)
o-ni-gi-ri-me
67. i-nu
‘dog’
su-nu.u-pi.i
‘Snoopy’
i-nu .u-pi .i
68. ma.i-na.a
‘minor’
me-zja.a
‘major’
ma .i-zja.a
kjo. 0-so .o-sja-ka. i
‘competitive society’
se .i-z0.n-sja-ka.i
70. zja.a
‘well then’
da. t-ta-ra
‘if so’
zja. t-ta-ra
7 1. tjo .o-si
‘condition’
72. be.n-kjo.0
‘study’
73. na-go-ya-ka-ni-na.t-ta
‘became calm’
74. ma-ta-ma-ta
‘again’
75. na-ra.t-te
‘studied’
76. h0.p-p0.t-t0.i-te
‘Ieave it’
zjo .o-ta .i
‘condition’
tjo.0-ta.i
ke .n-kju .u
‘research’
be.n-kju.u
ya-wa-ra.i-da
‘became softened’
na-go-ya
hu-ta-ta-bi
‘again’
ma-ta-ta-bi
ma-na .n-de
‘learned’
na-ra .n-de
ho t-to .i-te
‘none of your business’
ho. t-to. t-t0.i-te
69. se .i-zo .n-kjo.0-so
‘survival race’
.o
.
-si
.i-da
APPENDIX 2
Blends in word formation
AB
1. da-su-to
‘dust’
2. go-ri-ra
‘gorilla’
I
XY
-b
AY
zo .o-ki .n
‘dust-cloth’
da-su-ki. n
‘Dasukin’ (a dust-cloth
manufacturer)
ku -z i-r a
‘whale’
go-zi-ra
‘gojira’ (an imaginary animal)
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Mora arid Syllable Structure in Japanese
218
3. kja-be -tu
‘cabbage’
ni.n-zi.n
‘carrot’
kja-be-zi.n
‘Kyabejin’ (a medicine)
4. pi-a-no
‘piano’
ha .a-mo-ni-ka
‘harmonica’
pi-a-ni-ka
‘pianika’ (a musical instrument)
5. to -ra e -ru
‘to catch‘
tu-ka-ma .e-ru
‘tocatch‘
to-ra-ma.e-ru
‘to catch‘
6 . ya-bu-ru
‘to break’
sa-ku
‘to tear’
ya-bu-ku
‘to tear o f f
7. rjo-ka.n
‘inn’
ho-t e-ru
‘hotel’
rj o -t e-ru
‘inn and hotel’
8. 0.0-mo-ri
‘Omori’
ka-ma-ta
‘Kamat a’
0.0-ta
‘Ota’ (= placenames)
9. yu-su-ru
‘swing’
su-su-gu
‘wash‘
yu -su-gu
‘wash out’
10. sjo.0-wa
‘Showa’
ha.i-zi-ma
‘Haijima’
sjo .o-zi-ma
‘Shojima’ (= placenames)
11. h i - e
‘barnyard grass’
i-ne
‘rice’
hi-ne
‘a hie-rice hybrid’
12. go-te-ru
‘complain’
ko-ne-ru
‘a rg u fy ’
go-ne-ru
‘stubbornly persist’
13. 0-to-ko
‘man’
me .t-tje .n
‘Madchen’
0.t-tje.n
‘girl-like man (?)’
14. ta-bi
‘Japanese socks’
so.k-ku-su
‘socks’
ta-bi. k-ku-su
‘a brand name of socks’
15. re-ta.a
‘letter’
fa .k-ku-su
‘facsimile’
re-ta. k-ku-su
‘a new mail system’
16. ma .a-ko. t-to
‘marcot’ (a fruit)
ne .e-bu-ru
‘navel orange’
ma. a-bu-ru
‘a marcot-orange hybrid’
17. gu-re.e-pu
‘grape’
ne.e-bu-ru
‘navel orange’
gu-re .e-bu-ru
‘a grape-orange hybrid’
18. ma-ma
‘mama’
do-ra-go.n
‘dragon ’
ma-ma-go.n
‘a terrible mother’
19. ba.i-ba.i
‘bye-bye’
sa -yo -na -ra
‘good-bye’
ba.i-na-ra
‘good-bye’ (colloquial)
wa .n -t u
‘a brand name of pants for dogs’
21. sa-ga-su
‘search’
pa.n-tu
‘pants’
ta-zu-ne-ru
‘visit’
22. bi-ni.iku
Vinyl’
na.i-ro.n
‘nylon’
bi-ni-ro. n
‘vinylon’
.
.
.
20. wa n-wa n
‘bow wow’
sa-ga-ne-ru
‘search and visit’
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