Place asymmetry and markedness of labials in Japanese

The terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ can be interpreted in many different ways. One interpretation is that markedness is induced from ‘phonetic knowledge’. Hayes & Steriade (2004) argue that this is the driving force for the cross-linguistic patterns. Another interpretation of the term is based on textual frequency in a particular language; the more frequent a segment, the less marked it is. A gemination process in loanwords in Japanese provides evidence that goes against the predictions made by both of these notions of markedness. I propose that another perspective from which to understand markedness is a consequence of the structure of the language, i.e., structural markedness.