repetition ad nauseum

It turns out I still have a little to say about the repetition marker 々. The original example that set this off was 野々市市 nonoichi-shi 'Nonoichi City' which offers a nice illustration of when 々 -- a kanji 'repetition marker' -- is used, and when it is blocked. I took two rules from this case, as follows.

1. The use of 々 is unnatural across structural boundaries.
2. A 々 is only usable when the same character is repeated to stand for the same morpheme

The Nonoichi example is a particularly nice one because it illustrates both of these, since the use of 々 instead of the second 市 is blocked because of the word's structure -- [nonoichi[shi]] -- and because it is not a repetition of the morpheme (ichi) represented by the first 市. Then, in the previous post, I introduced one genuine counterexample,  様様 -samasama 'the Great ~', where the repetition marker is generally not used in order to avoid confusion with a different word, 様々samazama 'various'.

But it occurs to me that more evidence is needed to show that rules (1) and (2) are both necessary. After all, either of them alone would account for the case of 野々市市. So here are a couple of examples where 々 is blocked firstly by (1) alone, and secondly by rule (2) alone.

3. その時時田さんもいた cannot be written その時々田さんもいた
4. 日にち hinichi ('days/date') cannot be written 日々

(3) is an example I mentioned earlier, meaning 'At that time [時] Tokida [時田] was there too', and here the structural boundary is syntactic. So even though two instances of the morpheme toki are linearly adjacent, the use of 々 is blocked for the second one, as expected from rule (1). As for (4), it is rule (2) alone that blocks the use of 日々, but this point be better appreciated with some more background on the kanji 日. It is a very common kanji with meanings including 'day' and 'sun' and has a rather large number of readings (remember that a 'typical' kanji has two), the main ones being hi, jitsu, ka and nichi. The word hinichi, then, is made up of two different morphemes both representable by 日. So 々 is not usable here because, although the character is repeated (dictionary headwords confirm that the 'underlying' form of this word is 日日), the first morpheme (hi) is not. I should point out that 日々 is in fact a word, it's just not hinichi. The word written 日々 is pronounced either as hibi (doubling of hi with sequential voicing*) or nichinichi (doubling of nichi), both meaning 'every day/daily/...'. 


*If you are not familiar with Japanese you might be wondering why a change from /h/ to /b/ is described as voicing, which strictly it isn't, of course. I might post about this another time.