A Morphological Account of Japanese Western Loan Word Truncation

概要

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This paper examines the truncation or shortening of Japanese Western loan words and shows how such a process mirrors the general truncation pattern for all Japanese words. This work emphasizes the ability of loan word borrowers to decompose source words at the morphological level in order to apply a top-down truncation strategy. This study utilizes a corpus of over 200 loan truncata to predict salient truncation boundaries based on the collocations of segments in a database of approximately 30,000 Japanese words. Prior analyses of Japanese loan truncation, such as Ito(1990), Ito & Mester(1992), Buena(1995), and Kurisu(2001), represent Japanese loan truncation as a bottom-up process driven by a bimoraic template so fully motivate truncation based on syllabic weight. The current analysis calls attention to the decomposition of the source word as a strategy which applies to even non-Western Japanese loans. The top-down approach has several advantages over prior analyses : it expands the application of pre-existing constraints on Japanese truncation without the creation of additional mechanisms for a separate class of loan words ; it provides an account for variation in truncation outputs ; and it recognizes the source of loan words as bilingual speakers who can apply thier knowledge of the source language to generate novel outputs.