The Accentuation of Japanese Surnames

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  • 現代東京語の姓のアクセント
  • ゲンダイ トウキョウゴ ノ セイ ノ アクセント

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Abstract

Based on a corpus of 13,610 phonologically different Japanese surnames and their Tokyo Japanese accentuations, this paper shows that the surnames can be classified into three types according to how the accentuation is determined. The accentuation of the unmarked majority (approx. 69%) is determined by the length of the word-final morpheme. About 25% of surnames are accented according to rules which refer to the segmental make-up of the phonological environment. The remaining 6% are irregular and must be considered to be underlyingly marked. As expected from being irregular, the irregular surnames tend to be commonly used names-half of the top ten Japanese surnames by frequency are irregular by the analysis of this paper; this figure drops to 11.6% for the top 500 surnames. A rarely occurring surname with a marked accentuation points to the accentuation being due to rule, and not an exception. In addition to giving the main segmental environments which give rise to the marked accentuation in Japanese surnames, this paper also gives the rule which accounts for the accentuation of names of temples ending in -zi with a preceding 3- or 4-mora constituent.

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