Exploring Avoidance of Consecutive Heavy Syllables in Japanese Clipped Compounds

Abstract

This study examined whether clipped compounds in Japanese tend to avoid containing consecutive heavy syllables across the morpheme boundary (*H#H). A survey using the database of existing clipped compounds (Moon 2021) showed that there are fewer forms with H#H than those with LL#LL, H#LL or LL#H. We then conducted an experiment using nonce compounds each of which consisted of a nonce word (N1) and a real word (N2). The results showed that not all forms with H#H were avoided as a clipped compound. We confirmed, however, that when N1 begins with a syllable that contains a long vowel or a geminate consonant, these elements were not adopted as a new clipped compound and instead the third mora following them was adopted, which is consistent with the argument in the past literature.