Vowel epenthesis in Japanese loanword adaptation

Abstract

It is a generally accepted idea that vowel epenthesis is the main strategy used to repair illicit vowels in Japanese loanword adaptation; however, little attention has been paid to the quality of epenthetic vowels and the processes triggering their occurrence. This paper aims at providing an optimality-theoretic account of the processes that cause each of the five Japanese vowels to surface as epenthetic vowels. All three processes of vowel epenthesis – default vowel epenthesis, consonant place assimilitation and vowel harmony – are defined in terms of feature insertion or feature spreading (Uffmann 2006, 2007). The paper provides as well a quantitative analysis regarding the frequency of epenthetic vowels and epenthesis strategies.

Keywords

• default vowel epenthesis
• vowel harmony
• consonant assimilation
• feature spreading