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Scales And Patterns Of Expressive Palatalization: Experimental Evidence From Japanese, Alexei Kochetov, John Alderete

Alexei Kochetov

This paper argues for the existence of expressive palatalization (E-Pal) – a phonologically unmotivated process that applies in sound symbolism, diminutive constructions, and babytalk registers. E-Pal is proposed to be grounded in iconic sound-meaning associations exploiting acoustic properties of palatalized consonants, and thus is inherently different from regular phonological palatalization (P-Pal). A cross-linguistic survey of patterns of E-Pal in 37 languages shows that it exhibits a set of properties different from P-Pal. As a case study, the paper focuses on patterns of palatalization in Japanese mimetic vocabulary and babytalk. Two experiments tested native speaker intuitions of these patterns and revealed …