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Stricture and nasal place assimilation

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Abstract

Theories of feature organization typically treat stricture features like [continuant], [consonantal] and [approximant] as independent of place of articulation features. The best argument for this view centers on [continuant] and facts of nasal place assimilation — in particular, instances of nasal place assimilation to fricatives, where the nasal appears to remain a stop. However, a closer look at nasal place assimilation provides a strong argument against this standard view: across languages, place assimilation to fricatives is highly disfavored in comparison to assimilation to stops, and occurring nasal-fricative clusters behave like affricates. I show how a theory in which [continuant] is place-dependent can explain these facts, exploiting the notion of structure preservation. The treatment of stricture proposed brings feature geometry more in line with models based on facts of phonetics and vocal tract anatomy, e.g., the gestural model of Browman and Goldstein.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Stevenson College, UC Santa Cruz, 95064, Santa Cruz, CA

    Jaye Padgett

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This paper has benefited from discussions with many people, including audiences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the University of Pennsylvania; Cornell University; the University of Maryland, College Park; the University of California, Santa Cruz and the NSF Workshop on Properties of Feature Organization at UCSC, July 1991. I am especially grateful to John McCarthy and Lisa Selkirk and to the following people: Abby Cohn, Louis Goldstein, Roger Higgins, Beth Hume, Sharon Inkelas, Junko Itô, Michael Kenstowicz, Armin Mester, Máire Ní Chiosáin and three anonymousNLLT reviewers. All mistakes are my own responsibility.

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Padgett, J. Stricture and nasal place assimilation. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 12, 465–513 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01118137

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