The phonology of consonant voicing

AbstractChapter 4 first presents a comprehensive overview of the issue of consonant voicing in Japanese, which is characterised by a number of specific and rather outstanding properties, including low frequency, phonotactic restrictions, historical instability and transparency, failure to undergo gemination and so on. It also considers their historical development and status in the writing system and offers an original analysis of the internal structure of the Japanese voiced obstruents within the framework of autosegmental phonology and feature geometry. This chapter also provides a detailed presentation of rendaku, one of the most studied and debated issue in Japanese morpho-phonology, and a section on post-nasal voicing, before concluding that voicing could be regarded as a supra-segmental feature rather than as a segmental one in Japanese.