Palatalization in Japanese Mimetics: Response to Mester and Itô

A response to R. Armin Mester's & Junko Ito's (M&I) "Feature Predictability and Underspecification: Palatal Prosody in Japanese Mimetics" (see LLBA 23/4, 8907549). M&I assume that palatalization is a productive morpheme in Japanese, but by using a large database on mimetics in Japanese prepared for the Japanese Ministry of Education, it is shown here that there is almost no clear evidence for this assumption. It is concluded that what M&I claim to be a palatalization morpheme with the meaning 'uncontrolledness' represents at most a highly sporadic sound-symbolic tendency. Consequently, the entire argument for restricted underspecification proposed by M&I has a weak foundation. It is also noted that if the M&I argument is revised so that palatalization is not claimed to be a morpheme, the argument loses its main force. 12 References. AA