Stress Nativization in Japanese

Yesterday in the LingLunch Series I saw one of those talks that’s factually useful, but which ignores what’s really interesting about the data collected.

This one was given by Aaron Albin and was about accent in loan words in Japanese. Official title: “Historical nativization of source-faithful patterns in the accentuation of Japanese loanwords.” (The abstract can be found here.)

It seems that Japanese, when it borrows words, likes it if the accent can be on the antepenultimate mora (roughly: vowel). However, Japanese, unlike most of the languages it borrows words from, is also OK with words having no stress accent at all. So you get two effects over time: the stress could shift to the antepenultimate mora from some other locus, or it can be dropped altogether. And the more interesting contribution would’ve been to say which repair happens to which words and why (they’re mutually exclusive, so you can’t have both). But this talk focused on whether the tendency for stressed words is to adopt the native pattern or to conform to the stress they had in their source language over time.

The methodology was this: he found a freely-available 1892 dictionary and combed through it for all words that had a romaji transcription in their entry – indicating loanword status. He then recorded the source language and stress pattern and whether there was any reported variability in the stress pattern. Then, he cross-referenced all of these with their entries in a 1995 dictionary, also recording source language, stress pattern, and whether any variability was reported. In cases where the source language was reported differently, preference was given to the 1995 version and if a word did not appear in both sources, it was dropped. Altogether, I think there were 275 words in the survey.

The data was then encoded using the following features sets: +/-A for “antepenultimate,” indicating whether stress fell on the antepenultimate mora, and +/-F for “faithful,” indicating whether stress was determined by where it originated in the source language (with +F meaning “faithful to the source”). A separate encoding was given for each entry for +/-V, for whether there were more than one variety of a word in use at a given time.

The talk was mostly concerned with the [+/-A, +/-F] opposition. And the conclusion was pretty much what you would expect: over time, to the extent that there is change, it’s in the direction of [+A,-F] more than in the direction of [-A, +F]. This is only logical: most Japanese speakers will hear the words not from native speakers of their source languages, but rather from other Japanese people, and so they’ll tend to apply their native stress pattern. If you don’t find that convincing (say, you think that increased exposure to western culture in 1995 as compared with 1892 will have brought in greater sensitivity to foreign stress patterns), think about how obnoxious it sounds when someone pronounces Spanish loanwords with a Mexican accent, but otherwise speaks normal English. It’s just unnatural. You don’t roll your /r/ in burrito because English doesn’t have rolled /r/s. And that’s true for Japanese and every other language in the world: foreign sound patterns sound unnatural.

But that’s why I found the presentation a little bit lacking. Simply reconfirming what everyone already knows – that stress patterns in loan words will nativize with time – seems a bit of a letdown when there’s an opportunity sitting right there in the data to look at something new. Namely – if you think of moving stress to the antepenultimate mora from some other locus and deaccentuization (?) (getting rid of accent altogether) as two potential but mutually exclusive repair processes, it’s an interesting question which the language will tend to apply to which words and why. THAT would have been the more interesting talk to give. Limit your study to the group of words that exhibit one of these two repair mechanisms and try to say what caused each to go the way they did.

Another thing that I didn’t see much comment on was the fact that the overwhelming majority of cases were already [+A, +F] to begin with. As could be predicted, no member of this group switched; they all retained their [+A] from 1892 in 1995. But it’s nevertheless striking that this was by far the biggest group. Now, Japanese has no closed syllables (well, with some debatable exceptions), so a lot of syllabic repair is necessary when borrowing, and it usually takes the form of inserting vowels to break up illegal consonant clusters (though, putting it in exactly that way is probably not entirely accurate since there is no real concept of a consonant cluster to break up to a native speaker of Japanese). So it’s at least worth speculating that the need to have the stress end up on the antepenultimate mora guides a lot of decisions in how to apply the syllable repair operations in the first place. That, too, would’ve been a more interesting thing to report on than simply confirming that the trend over time is always toward nativization.

But it’s an interesting dataset, and I suggested the “which repair and why?” study to Mr. Albin after the talk, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this over the next year.

- Joshua

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