Nasal consonant speech errors: Implications for ‘‘similarity’’ and nasal harmony at a distance (original) (raw)

Nasal consonants, sonority and syllable phonotactics: the dual nasal hypothesis

Phonology

We investigate the phonotactic behaviour of nasal consonants in a database of over 200 languages. Our findings challenge the common classification of nasals as intermediate between obstruents and liquids on the sonority hierarchy. Instead, we propose that there are two types of nasal consonants, one group with lower sonority than liquids and one with higher sonority. We propose that these two types of nasals differ in the presence or absence of a value for the feature [±continuant].

Locality and the nature of nasal harmony

Lingua, 1997

There is a general consensus in phonology that relations conform to a locality requirement imposing a strict adjacency condition on related entities. One pattern of nasal harmony adheres to this condition; nasality extends over a sequence of segments that may include vowels, semivowels, liquids, nasals and fricatives, and no segments can be skipped. In another pattern, locality appears to be violated, because obstruents are invariably transparent. This paper proposes a novel solution to the locality problem posed by the latter by advancing a theory in which nasality always spreads locally either at the segmental level or at the level of the heads/nucleus of syllables. The apparent skipping of obstruents arises in the second mode of spreading, a type of vowel harmony. The analysis attributes the obligatory nasalisation of sonorant consonants when harmony is the nucleus-to-nucleus type to an independent principle of Syllable Nasalisation, which is necessarily in effect when Nasal is a syllabic feature.

Ikwere Nasal Harmony in Typological Perspective

2003

This paper addresses the question: why are some consonants more resistant to nasalization than others? It presents data from Ikwere, an Igboid language spoken in Nigeria, which sheds new light on this question. Ikwere has a pattern of nasal harmony which spreads nasality across certain domains within the word. Certain consonants undergo nasalization while others block its spread. The class of blocking segments comprises all obstruent stops and fricatives. However, the two nonexplosive labial stops represent an apparent exception in that they fail to block nasalization. A phonetic study of these sounds, reported below, shows that they are not in fact obstruents as they produced with no buildup of air pressure behind the labial closure. The full generalization is thus that all and only obstruents block nasalization. On the basis of this result, it is proposed that the basic property underlying the scale of resistance to nasal spreading is obstruence, that is, degree of intraoral air p...

*NT revisited again: An approach to postnasal laryngeal alternations with perceptual Cue constraints

Journal of Linguistics, 2015

Phonological alternations in homorganic nasal-stop sequences provide a continuing topic of investigation for phonologists and phoneticians alike. Surveys like Herbert (1986), Rosenthal (1989), Steriade (1993) and Hyman (2001) demonstrate that cross-linguistically the most common process is for the postnasal stop to become voiced, as captured by Pater's (1999) markedness constraint *NT. However, as observed since Hyman (2001), *NT alone does not account for all postnasal patterns of laryngeal alternation. In this paper, we focus on three problematic patterns. First, in some languages with a two-way laryngeal contrast, voiceless stops are aspirated postnasally, i.e. the contrast between NT and ND is enhanced, not neutralized. Second, in some languages with a three-way laryngeal contrast, the voicing contrast is maintained postnasally, while the aspiration contrast neutralizes in favour of aspiration. Third, in other languages with a three-way laryngeal contrast we find the opposite postnasal aspiration neutralization: aspiration is lost. We argue that an analysis based on perceptual cues provides the best account for this range of alternations. It demonstrates the crucial role of perceptual cues and laryngeal contrasts in a particular language while fitting the range of patterns into an Optimality Theoretic factorial typology that covers a wider range of postnasal laryngeal alternations than previous analyses.