Abstract
Asymmetries are beginning to attract serious attention in linguistics. Whether structural, functional or otherwise, they are closely related to the notion 'markedness' or 'naturalness' in language, and are expected to reveal fundamental properties and principles of language structure. With this general trend in mind, this paper attempts to provide an overview of various kinds of phonological asymmetries observed in Japanese and other languages. While positional and directional asymmetries are well documented in the literature, other types of asymmetries have not received the sufficient attention that they deserve. This paper classifies these asymmetries into several types and describes their implications for phonological studies.
