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What Do Kanji Graphs Represent in the Current Japanese Writing System? Towards a Unified Model of Kanji As Written Signs

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What Do Kanji Graphs Represent in the Current Japanese Writing system? Towards a Unified Model of Kanji as Written Signs Keisuke Honda Abstract. In the current Japanese writing system, kanji graphs constitute a ma­ jor subpart of its signary. There are two opposing views on how to characterise them in linguistic terms, making different claims about the type of linguistic unit they represent. The first view claims that kanji graphs are based primarily on the morpheme because a majority of currently used graphs represent indi­ vidual morphemes. The second view maintains that they are based primarily on the sound and only secondarily on the morpheme because all graphs represent sounds that may or may not correspond to individual morphemes. The present paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both views and sketches out a new, unified model of how kanji graphs function as written signs. In this model, kanji graphs are seen as the formal building blocks of simplex or complex written signs representing the phonological exponents of individual morphemes. Introduction This paper discusses the type of linguistic unit represented by the graphs of the kanji (漢字) script in the present­day Japanese writing system. The starting point of the present article is a practice widely observed in graphemics, in which individual writing systems are referred to as being ‘phonemic,’ ‘syllabic,’ ‘morphemic’ and so on (Section 1). More specifically, each writing system is characterised in terms of apartic­ ular type of linguistic unit (e.g., phoneme) if all or most of its written signs represent the individual instances of that unit (e.g., /i/, /a/, /o/, /p/, /t/, /k/, …). A prerequisite for such a characterisation is a linguistic analysis of the signary, that is, the set of written signs employed in the given writing system. The validity of the characterisation, then, depends on the adequacy of the signary analysis. Keisuke Honda 0000-0003-4228-5406 Imperial College London, Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom University of Oxford, Oxford University Language Centre 12 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HT, United Kingdom E­mail: [email protected] Y. Haralambous (Ed.), Graphemics in the 21st Century. Brest, June 13­15, 2018. Proceedings Grapholinguistics and Its Applications (ISSN: 2534­5192), Vol. 1. Fluxus Editions, Brest, 2019, p. 185–208. https://doi.org/10.36824/2018-graf-hond ISBN: 978­2­9570549­0­9, e­ISBN: 978­2­9570549­1­6 186 Keisuke Honda In this regard, Japanese kanji graphs deserve special attention (Sec­ tion 2). They are sinographs or ‘Chinese characters’ employed in the Japanese writing system, used alongside the graphs of the kanji­derived hiragana (平仮名) and katakana (片仮名) scripts as well as the Latin script known as rōmaji (ローマ字) (Smith 1996, pp. 209–210; Honda 2012, pp. 39–47; I. Taylor and M. M. Taylor 2014, pp. 271–283).1 De­ spite the persisting belief that kanji graphs represent things and ideas without recourse to language (e.g., Suzuki 1975, p. 178), they are in fact closely related to the phonological, morphological and semantic proper­ ties of the Japanese lexicon (e.g., Unger 1987, pp. 45–49, 1990, pp. 397– 411; Kōno 1994, p. 11; Matsunaga 1996, pp. 2–12). Today kanji graphs are used mainly to write individual content words or their stems in the Sino­ Japanese, native Japanese and hybrid vocabularies. Given the mixed use of kanji and other graphs, kanji graphs constitute what may be seen as a major subpart of the signary of the Japanese writing system. An im­ portant question, then, is whether a single type of linguistic unit should be postulated to account for the functioning of kanji graphs and, if so, what that unit might be. In the literature, it is possible to identify two major schools of thought on this question (Sections 3 and 4). For convenience, the present paper refers to the first one as the morphographic theory and the second one as the morphophonic theory, borrowing the respective terms from Joyce (2011, p. 58) and Matsunaga (1996, p. 17).2 The morpho­ graphic theory claims that kanji should be considered primarily mor­ phemic because there is a one­to­one correspondence between indi­ vidual graphs and morphemes in most kanji­written words (Hill 1967, pp. 93–96; Miller 1967, pp. 92–93; 1986, 15ff; Nomura 1999, pp. 1–3; Sproat 2000, pp. 154–160; Joyce 2001, pp. 12–111; 2011, pp. 63–72; Samp­ son 2015, pp. 208–232). In contrast, the morphophonic theory holds that kanji graphs are primarily phonographic and only secondarily mor­ phemic because all graphs represent sounds that may or may not corre­ spond to individual morphemes (DeFrancis 1989, pp. 138–143; Matsu­ naga 1994, pp. 34–39, 1996, pp. 14–18; also see Unger 1987, pp. 35–49; DeFrancis and Unger 1994; Unger and DeFrancis 1995). To the knowledge of the present author, there has been little attempt to examine the validity of these two theories through direct compari­ son. However, they deserve special consideration because they provide 1. For a comprehensive description of kanji graphs and their use, see Satō (1987– 1989), Satō et al. (1996), and Kōno, Nagata, and Sasahara (2001), among others. 2. DeFrancis (1989, p. 58) first proposed the term ‘morphophonic,’ together with the alternative form ‘morphonic’. The present paper adopts the former, although with a warning not to confuse it with the unrelated term ‘morphophonemic,’ because the latter is conventionally associated with the notion of ‘morphon’ in Stratificational Grammar (Lamb, 1966). What Do Kanji Graphs Represent in the Japanese Writing system? 187 significantly different interpretations of the way kanji graphs function as written signs. According to the morphographic theory, kanji graphs relate directly to the morphological level of linguistic representation. An important implication of this notion is that they function in a funda­ mentally different way from phonographs or phonologically based writ­ ten signs. Contrastively, the morphophonic theory suggests that kanji graphs relate mainly to phonology and only optionally to morphology. This implies that they share a common ground with phonographs, in that sounds play a crucial role in both types of written signs. These con­ siderations motivate a comparative examination of the two existing the­ ories. This paper presents a critical analysis of the morphographic and mor­ phophonic theories and develops a preliminary sketch of a new, unified model of how kanji function as written signs in the current Japanese writing system. Section 1 introduces the notion of linguistic unit under­ lying a writing system. Section 2 provides the necessary background on kanji graphs and kanji­written words. Section 3 takes a closer look at the morphographic theory, with a particular focus on the analysis of two­ kanji compound words presented by Joyce (2001; 2011). Section 4 turns to the morphophonic theory, focusing on Matsunaga’s (1994; 1996) dis­ cussion of what are known as the phonetic elements of kanji graphs. Section 5 proposes an integrated model of kanji as written signs, which draws on the advantages of the existing theories while avoiding their disadvantages. In this proposed model, kanji graphs are viewed as the formal building blocks of structurally simplex or complex written signs representing the phonological exponents of individual morphemes. Sec­ tion 5 summarises the discussion and draws conclusions. 1. Linguistic Unit Underlying a Writing System Writing may be seen as a system of visible and/or tactile marks, by means of which utterances can be encoded into and decoded from par­ ticular graphical representations in a more or less conventional manner (Daniels 1996, p. 3; 2018, pp. 156–157; Coulmas 2003, pp. 1–17). This pa­ per refers to such marks individually as graphs (Sampson, 2015, pp. 10–11) and collectively as a script (Sproat, 2000, p. 25). Graphs may be used in­ dividually (e.g., <p>) or in fixed combinations (e.g., <pp>) to represent distinct sounds (e.g., /p/), sound combinations (e.g., /pa/), or sound­ meaning units (e.g., /papa/ ‘father’). Thus, one may speak of written signs, each formed by an arbitrary association of a graphical form as the signi­ fier (e.g., <p>) and a linguistic value as the signified (e.g., /p/).3 When a 3. This account is based on Saussure’s (1916) dyadic model of signs. It remains an open question whether this model is in any way preferable to Peirce’s (1931–1958) 188 Keisuke Honda set of written signs is used in accordance with a body of conventions to write a particular language, it is common to regard them respectively as the signary and the orthography of a writing system (Daniels and Bright 1996, pp. xliii–xliv; Coulmas 2003, pp. 35–36). The notion of linguistic unit plays a crucial role in graphemics or the linguistic study of writing systems. Firstly, it is commonly assumed that each written sign represents a specific instance of a particular linguis­ tic unit. For example, a written sign is said to represent a phoneme if its graph corresponds to a single vowel or consonant (e.g., ‘Finnish <p> represents /p/’), or a morpheme if the graph has a sound­meaning value (e.g., ‘Chinese 山 represents {mountain} = /shān/ ‘mountain’) (for more examples, see descriptions of the world’s writing systems in Daniels and Bright 1996 and Kōno, Chino, and Nishida 2001). Secondly, as al­ ready mentioned in the introduction to this paper, it is common to characterise a writing system in terms of a particular linguistic unit (e.g., ‘Finnish is a phonemic writing system,’ ‘Chinese writing system is morphemic’) (again, see Daniels and Bright 1996 and Kōno, Chino, and Nishida 2001). The underlying assumption seems to be that every writing system can be—or even should be—described in terms of one single type of linguistic unit that is most relevant to the signary of that system.4 Gelb (1963, pp.
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