Phonological and Familiarity Effects on Adjective Truncation in Japanese
Abstract
This paper investigates adjective truncation in Japanese and identifies three classes of adjectives that systematically resist truncation: adjectives ending in /ii/, adjectives with monomoraic roots, and unfamiliar adjectives. While previous work has attributed the resistance of certain adjectives to semantic factors, I argue that the observed patterns are primarily governed by phonological structure and lexical familiarity. Building on the analysis of internal expressive sentences, I propose that adjective truncation is motivated by the resolution of vowel hiatus and can be accounted for within Optimality Theory using independently motivated constraints. Specifically, truncation is driven by the interaction of ONSET, output-to-output faithfulness constraints, prosodic constraints such as FT-BIN and GRWD=PRWD, and lexically indexed faithfulness constraints. A pilot acceptability study provides preliminary support for the proposed generalizations. The analysis demonstrates that Japanese adjective truncation follows from the interaction of general phonological principles, prosodic well-formedness, and lexical familiarity, without requiring language-specific mechanisms.