A precedence-free approach to (de-)palatalisation in Japanese

Japanese exhibits two patterns involving palatality: palatalisation, which causes two adjacent segments to share palatality, and de-palatalisation, which renders one of those two adjacent segments unable to sustain the shared palatal property. These patterns are traditionally analysed by referring to the notions of adjacency and/or precedence. By contrast, in the context of Precedence-free Phonology (Nasukawa 2014, 2015ab) this paper re-analyses these phenomena by referring to the head-dependency relations that are necessary for building structure, rather than by appealing to precedence relations. In this model, precedence is merely a natural result of interpreting the dependency relations that hold between units in hierarchical phonological structure