Timothy J. Vance (University of Arizona) : Rendaku in Inflected Words

Okumura (Kokugogaku jiten 1955) and many others have claimed that rendaku does not occur in compounds of inflected word plus inflected word. He compares wakach-i+kak-u ‘write with spaces between words’ and wakach-i+gak-i ‘writing with spaces between words’. Both examples derive from the verbs wakac-u ‘divide’ and kak-u ‘write’, and the former, like all non-final verbal elements in compounds, appears in its “stem” form wakach-i. The verb wakach-i+kak-u (V1+V23DV) is given here in its citation form, with the second element bearing the inflectional ending /u/ for nonpast affirmative. The noun wakach-i+gak-i (V1+V23DN), on the other hand, does not inflect; the second element is fixed in form. Okumura thus appears to be claiming that sequential voicing will not occur in a compound which consists of two inflected words and is itself an inflected word. As I noted in a paper in the Journal of the American Oriental Society in 1983, given the historical origin or sequential voicing, it makes sense for verb+verb compound verbs to lack sequential voicing.

This paper will report on a large set of relevant compound pairs collected by systematic use of reverse dictionaries. The data set shows that there are actually very few V1+V23DV/V1+V23DN pairs in which the noun shows sequential voicing and the verb does not, and that the putative regularity is at best a statistical tendency in the existing vocabulary. Furthermore, adjectives (the other major class of inflected words in Japanese) pattern very differently from verbs. The number of adjective+adjective compound adjectives is small, but almost half show sequential voicing. Sequential voicing also appears in nearly all verb+adjective compound adjectives and adjective+ verb compound verbs.