Nasal place assimilation Codas

lp hwĩ́wlp ‘he places him’ jk’ dənt͡ʃɑ̃́jk’ ‘your small squash’ lk hwĩ́wlk ‘he places me’ ʔk sɑ́ʔk ‘he trims for me’ nʔ nt͡sénʔ ‘not here’ ʔk’ sɑ́ʔk’ ‘he trims for you’ wʔs mɑ nʔdéwt͡s’ ‘he will write’ ʔp sɑ́ʔp ‘he trims for him’ ws kənhwɑ̃́ws ‘sweet drink’ wʔ sɑ́wʔ ‘he teaches’ wnʔ něwnʔ ‘he said’ jʔ ʃəʔjǔjʔ ‘polio’

5.4.1 Nasal place assimilation

Modal voice nasal consonants lose their specification for place in complex codas. If the nasal coda is simple, it will surface as a velar nasal allophone. 54 Nasal codas word final ɾhĩ́n [ɾhĩ́ŋ] ‘grandfather’ sĩ̌n [sĩ̌ŋ] ‘he opens’ mʰjə̃́n [mʰjə̃́ŋ] ‘soup’ mɑ̃́n [mɑ̃́ŋ] ‘he wants’ nɑ̃́wn [nɑ́wŋ] ‘he eats’ t͡suwǽn [t͡suwǽg͡ŋ] ‘he is angry’ gutə́n [ɣutə́g͡ŋ] ‘lion’ tɑ́wn [tɑ̌wg͡ŋ] ‘he buys’ mǔn [mǔg͡ŋ] ‘it is born’ sə́hən [sə́həg͡ŋ] ‘he dines’ ʎǔmp [ʎǔb͡ḿp] ‘his chicken’ mʔínt [mʔíd͡nt] ‘heavy’ As noted earlier, should a simple nasal coda follow an oral vowel, the nasal will be prestopped see ‘denasalization’ above. Moreover, if the nasal coda is followed by a stop, the only consonant that can follow a nasal coda, the nasal will assimilate to the place specification of the following stop. Below are additional data of nasal codas in word medial position. Notice that the nasal coda assimilates to the place specification of the following onset consonant 35 Itô 1989: 224-25, a common process for nasals in consonant clusters. 55 Nasal codas word medial [mp] [skəmpǔ] ‘your fingernail’ [mp] [gəmpjú] ‘cohete’ [mb] [ʎúmbət] ‘his chickens’ [mb] [təʔlʰṹmbe] ‘we.Dl. are calm’ [nt] [kəntǽ] ‘water’ [nt’] [sənt’ɑ̌j] ‘hand’ [nd] [ʎúndət] ‘my chickens’ [nd] [k’ənděwdn’] ‘you are about to say’ [ŋk] [mɑ ŋʔkɑsɑẃʔ] ‘you will learn’ 35 Voiced velar stop onsets never occur in word medial clusters in Northern Pame. [ŋk] [mɑ ŋʔkəɾɑ́hɑw] ‘you will speak’ The fact that Northern Pame nasal codas lack place specifications is analogous to many languages around the world. The explanation for this is summed up in the Coda Condition, which is a constraint prohibiting place on syllable codas Goldsmith 1990, Itô 1989. In these types of systems, nasal codas acquire surface place articulation by the following consonant in word medial clusters. Word finally, the Coda Condition is either violated or the place of articulation is acquired in some type of post-lexical process. 56 CODA-COND Fudge 1969, Selkirk 1982, Itô 1989 ‘Independent place features are prohibited in codas’ The data facts for Northern Pame show that the Coda Condition does not apply across the board. As the data in tables 5-5 and 5-6 illustrate, obstruents license place in syllable codas. However, leaving the exception of coda obstruents aside let us examine nasal codas only in this section. Looking at the word medial examples first, we see that nasals assimilate to the place of a following stop, and moreover, the stop is an onset of the following syllable. Such a process can be interpreted as a violation of nasal place IDENT Place precipitated by the Coda Condition. 36 57 IDENTPlace McCarthy and Prince 1995 ‘Output segments have input correspondents for Place’ 58 Markedness dominates faithfulness CODA-CONDIDENTPlace 59 Nasal place assimilation word medial Input: skənpǔ CODA-COND IDENTPlace a. skənpǔ b.☞ skəmpǔ By applying the constraint ranking in 58, we see some possible candidates in 59. Candidate a is the faithful one, where the nasal preserves its place specification while in a syllable coda. This has the fatal effect of violating CODA-COND. Candidate b takes the opposite approach of violating the place specification of the nasal, thus allowing CODA-COND to apply. Thus, b is the winner. The same strategy works for word final nasals followed by a stop. 60 Nasal place assimilation word final Input: ʎǔnp CODA-COND IDENTPlace a. ʎǔnp b.☞ ʎǔmp 36 Nasal codas always agree in place to a following stop if there is one. In cases where the nasal is a simple coda i.e. word finally, it always surfaces as a non-phonemic velar nasal as described in the following section. Nasal placeless codas are represented with the alveolar nasal n phoneme in underlying form for notational purposes only

5.4.2 Nasal velarization