The aim of this study is to understand how /r/ emerged and developed in Proto-Japanese and how the conditions of its emergence shed light on its present phonological behavior. The paper first offers a review of the phonetic, phonological, and morpho-phonological characteristics of /r/ in Japanese through examination of a large array of empirical evidence. The picture that emerges is that of an unmarked, phonologically empty segment, confirming a number of previous studies, in particular that by Mester and Itoˆ (Language 65:258-293, 1989). I argue that /r/ primarily developed in Japanese as a default epenthetic consonant in the intervocalic position within the morphological domain of a stem and its affixes, through an 'emergence of the unmarked' mechanism before becoming a fully contrastive phoneme later on by virtue of a phonologization process. A formal account of this proposal within the framework of Optimality Theory is offered. It is shown that the phonological content of /r/ is acquired due to the application of well-formedness constraints (ONSET, ALIGN, MAXIO, DEPIO) as well as that of two sets of markedness constraints (FEATURAL AGREEMENT and HARMONY SCALE), which ensure that the null input is mapped to the least marked output in terms of phonological features.
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机译：这项研究的目的是了解/ r /在原始日语中是如何出现和发展的，以及其出现的条件如何阐明其当前的语音行为。本文首先通过检查大量的经验证据，对/ r /在日语中的语音，语音和形态语音特征进行了综述。出现的图像是一个没有标记的，语音上空的部分，这证实了以前的许多研究，特别是梅斯特和伊藤ˆ的研究（Language 65：258-293，1989）。我认为/ r /主要是在日语中发展成为词干及其词缀形态域内交际位置的默认美学辅音，通过“未标记的”机制的出现而成为后来的完全对比音素语音化过程。在最优性理论的框架内，对该提议进行了正式说明。结果表明，/ r /的语音内容是由于应用了格式良好的约束（ONSET，ALIGN，MAXIO，DEPIO）以及两组标记约束（FEATURAL AGREEMENT和HARMONY SCALE）而获得的，确保将空输入映射到语音特征上标记最少的输出。
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