Predicting the unpredictable: Capturing the apparent semi-regularity of rendaku voicing in Japanese through harmonic grammar

Semi-regular phonological processes occur often in natural language. For example, rendaku voicing in Japanese fails to occur in a seemingly random fashion among roughly 16% of certain classes of compounds. This presents an analytical challenge for generative theories with exceptionless rules or categorical constraints: irregularity of any kind must arise within lexical representations, not the grammar. For example, the compound in (1) predictably voices by the rule of rendaku voicing McCawley (1968, inter alia) but the compound in (2) doesn’t. There is no known phonological distinction between kuma and yama that enables a rule or constraint to explain the difference.