Consequences of High Vowel Deletion for Syllabification in Japanese
Jason Shaw, Shigeto Kawahara
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003854
January 2018
The EMA study reported in Shaw and Kawahara (2018) showed that Japanese /u/ optionally deletes in devoicing environments, yielding consonant clusters. This paper presents both phonological and phonetic evidence which suggests that these consonant clusters are parsed heterosyllabically. The current results imply a rather surprising conclusion that Japanese allows consonantal syllables headed by a fricative or an affricate, a conclusion that is especially surprising in light of the view that considers Japanese a “strict CV-language”