Outer/inner morphology: The dichotomy of Japanese renyoo verbs and nouns

Abstract

This paper investigates the morpho-phonological differences between the nominal and verbal conjugational forms of renyoo (a preverbal form) in terms of (i) idiosyncrasy, (ii) productivity, and (iii) accent shift. All of these properties indicate that the two renyoo morphemes appear in different syntactic positions: with renyoo-verbs, the root first merges with the categorizer v and then with the REN(yoo) head, whereas with renyoo-nouns, the root directly merges with the categorizer n, which is phonologically realized as the renyoo morpheme. Our analysis consequently supports Marantz’s (2007) inner/outer morphology division within a word, and also provides implications for Chomsky’s (2013) {H, H} Labeling Algorithm (Sugimura & Obata 2014).