Prosodic structure and sandhi phenomena in the Saru dialect of Ainu

Hamburg: Walter de Gruyter. Issues in Japanese Phonology and Morphology, 2001, p. 141-158.This paper examines the consonantal sandhi phenomena of Ainu and points out that a similar distinction can be observed in at least two sandhi processes centering on n and r, which we will term n-alternation and r-alternation, respectively. The two processes occur in virtually every dialect of the language and have been reported from the earliest stages of linguistic research (e.g. Pilsudski 1912, Kindaichi 1931). Despite this fact, little attention has been paid to their exact domain of application. A closer look at the distribution of the phenomena informs us, however, that they exhibit a significant contrast with respect to their domain. An examination of a corpus of the Saru dialect reveals that the n-alternation is sensitive to a certain syntactic boundary (and hence a P-structure rule), but the r-alternation is not (and hence is a Pure phonological rule).