<OT> New Posting: ROA-670

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ROA 670-0804

The Phonology of Implosive Nasals in Five Spanish Dialects: An Optimality Account

Carlos-Eduardo Pineros <carlos-eduardo-pineros at uiowa.edu>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=670


Abstract:
The common assumption that coronal is the unmarked place
of articulation seems to be contradicted by the tendency
of implosive nasals to become velar. To cope with this unexpected
behavior of nasal consonants, some linguists have proposed
that coronal is the unmarked place in the syllable onset,
but velar is the unmarked place in the coda (Trigo 1988).
An alternative proposal is that specific grammars may select
coronal or velar as the default place (Harris 1984).  Others
defend the view that implosive nasals become velar by sharing
place features with the preceding vowel (Paradis and Prunet
1990). Yet another interpretation has been to assume that
the derived velar nasals are actually not velar (Bakovic
2000). The patterns exhibited by implosive nasals in Spanish
dialects are pertinent to this debate because both coronal
and velar place behave as though they were the unmarked
specification for nasal consonants in the coda.
In this paper, a system in which the main allophones of
implosive nasals include a place-assimilated nasal, an alveolar
nasal, a velar nasal, and a nasalized vowel is analyzed
as the result of three independent markedness constraints
(AGREE(Place), Place Hierarchy, and ALIGN-C(Nasal)), which
despite being concerned with different aspects of the structure
of output forms, come together to undermine the place features
of implosive nasals. Data from five different Spanish dialects
support the view that coronal is the unmarked place even
in the syllable coda, and that the tendency of implosive
nasals to become velar is not a consequence of assigning
them an unmarked place articulator but of reducing their
degree of consonantality. It is shown that velarization
is only an intermediate step in a larger-scale change that
involves the absorption of the nasal consonant by a preceding
vowel.

Comments: 
Keywords: nasals, neutralization, assimilation, velarization, nasal absorption
Areas: Phonology
Type: Manuscript

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=670