Zero Plurals among the Japanese Loanwords in English

Abstract

F OR DECADES THE USUAL MORPHOLOGICAL VIEW of inflected languages has involved an analysis of derivational and inflectional elements which may be affixed to other morphemes, with tabulated paradigmatic charts like those of Francis (1954) and Gleason (1961). However, what if the lexicon of a language changes in such a way as to require substantive revision of such charts within the analysis? Such is the case for the English language. Japanese has given English at least 544 different loanwords, few of which contain derivational morphemes. Most are native compounds, a basic kind of English morphemic structure. The standard dictionaries of English (including The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English) record at least 490 nouns, 52 adjectives, and 2 interjections borrowed from Japanese, plus 71 duplications caused by spelling variation, main entries for both the full and the short forms of an item, functional shifts, etc. When we inquire about the inflectional morphemes in this corpus, we note that there are no verbs. So the possible problem of the assimilation of Japanese borrowings into the verb inflection-system of English does not arise. However, at least 311 of the 490 nouns are clearly count nouns. A few others might be, as dictionaries may not have recorded a plural form when it actually exists. Where a plural spelling form is indicated, 182 take -s, and go 'a game' and hootch take -es. This analogized regularization is predictable, since most Japanese nouns end in a vowel. There are also 3 partially Latin items-Katsuwonidae, shigellae, and shigelloses. However, 125 borrowings have not fitted comfortably into the pluralization system; this number drastically enlarges the total number of irregular plurals in English. There are 89 which take -0 (table 1), 29 which can take either -0 or -s, and 7 collective nouns which occur only as zero plurals. The zero collectives are burakumin 'certain people treated as an inferior caste', genro 'Japanese elder statesmen', kanamono 'sword mounts', menuki 'pair of ornaments on a Japanese sword hilt', mompei 'work trousers', norito 'Shinto ritualistic prayers', and zaibatsu 'industrial conglomerate'. It might be noted that The Second Barnhart Dictionary records 28 Japanese nouns borrowed in the 1960s and 1970s, with 8 of 149

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