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An Introduction to Vowel-Consonant Nasal Harmony

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Substantive Bias and Natural Classes

Part of the book series: Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics ((FiCL,volume 8))

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Abstract

In this chapter, I introduce the typology of vowel-consonant nasal harmony to show what patterns look like in real languages, supporting the nasalized segment hierarchy introduced in Chap. 1. I briefly address two important factors in nasal harmony, opacity and transparency, and then introduce different analyses of how nasal harmony is triggered and represented in the generative phonology literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some people are concerned that participants would treat phonological artificial grammar learning like a non-linguistic game such as solving a puzzle, so that they would not use their phonological knowledge to learn the artificial grammar. I discuss this concern in more detail in Chap. 3.

  2. 2.

    Boersma (2003) indicates that in generative phonology, nasal harmony can be dealt with in three stages, underlying form, phonological form, and phonetic form (e.g., /mawesa/→/mãw̃ẽs̃ã/→ [mãw̃ẽs̃ã]).

  3. 3.

    Nasal harmony only occurs within a single syllable in Kaingang (see Walker 2011; Piggott and van der Hulst 1997: 101).

  4. 4.

    The blocking by fricatives suggests that, if the hierarchy is correct, stops should also block harmony. I was not able to find examples with stops in the appropriate position to confirm this.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Yu-Leng Lin

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  1. Yu-Leng Lin
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Correspondence to Yu-Leng Lin .

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Lin, YL. (2019). An Introduction to Vowel-Consonant Nasal Harmony. In: Substantive Bias and Natural Classes. Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3534-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3534-1_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-3533-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-3534-1

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