The Syntax and Phonology of Aoyagi plus Rendaku Compounds

This thesis provides an overview of the issues in the phonological voicing rule ‘rendaku’, which affects compounds, and its relation to phonological phrasing and syntax in Japanese. Previous analyses have focused on the direction of branching, the category of compounds, and accentedness in the hope of shedding light on a complex aspect of Japanese phonology. Since rendaku is assumed to apply only at word boundaries, it has been used as a test of word-hood by Poser (1984; 1990) in his analysis of a special class of prefixes that appear to allow a minor phrase boundary between them and the root to which they attach. This is unusual because the prefixes and stems appear to resist internal modification, which does imply that these are syntactic words that have phonological boundaries where there is no syntactic boundary. This indirect model of syntax to phonology mapping is investigated to see whether there really is such a syntax-phonology mismatch in such examples. Contrary to Poser’s analysis, what is shown here is that these prefixes can trigger rendaku in some cases, which suggests an alternative syntactic analysis. Furthermore, evidence from accentedness and scope relations shows a regular pattern that explains the presence of a phrasal accent contour, and a lexicalist approach is used to account for the structure of prefixed examples. In order to achieve this, a new morphological category, proposed by Kageyama (2001; 2016), is used to show how lexical integrity and compound structure can be maintained.