ITO, KUBOZONO, AND MESTER IN PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY OF GEMINATE CONSONANTS

An article by Junko Ito, Haruo Kubozono, and Armin Mester titled “A prosodic account of consonant gemination in Japanese loanwords” has recently been published in a series called The Phonetics and Phonology of Geminate Consonants (eds. Keren Rice and Andrew Nevins, Oxford Studies in Phonetics and Phonology). The paper is a study of the distribution of geminate consonants in Japanese loanwords, which differs in significant ways from their distribution in native words. Both prosodic markedness and faithfulness to the source word plays a central role. Sometimes, such as in loanwords from Italian, geminates are preserved as such. But usually, as in loanwords from English, gemination is a way of preserving word-final coda-hood in the source word. Whether or not a given consonant is geminated depends on a host of complex segmental factors that are the result of a whole family of anti-gemination constraints, ranked at different points within the constraint hierarchy of an optimality-theoretic grammar. Finally, significant higher-level prosodic factors that are part of the native system are at work, and explain many details of the gemination pattern that are rooted neither in faithfulness to the source word nor in segmental features.