Nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guarani spreads mostly leftward in a morphological word. This regressive nasalization is triggered by a phonologically nasal consonant or stressed nasal vowel and does not ...affect voiceless stops. A limited process of progressive nasalization affects morpheme-initial voiceless stops across a morpheme boundary. Many forms that include a causative prefix show this kind of progressive nasalization. However, this nasal spread lacks any obvious nasal trigger and does not occur consistently. In this paper, I propose an explanation of these cases as vestiges of earlier phonological rules from pre-Proto-Tupi-Guarani but not active in Paraguayan Guarani, followed by the emergence of a regressive oralization rule and ending in a reanalysis of the basic form of the causative prefix. In so doing, I will provide a revised sequence of changes involving contour allophones in the reconstruction of Proto-Tupi-Guarani (PTG).
Words containing morphemes from multiple languages offer a unique look into the grammatical systems that constrain word formation. In this paper, I introduce novel data from nasal harmony patterns in ...contexts involving word-internal language mixing between Paraguayan Guaraní and Spanish, collected with native speakers of Guaraní. I provide the first full formal constraint-based analysis of nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guaraní, then show that nasal consonants within Spanish roots trigger nasal harmony in Guaraní affixal morphology, providing evidence for an emergent case of long-distance nasal harmony in the language. I demonstrate that this data supports an analysis in which a single phonological system has access to two different strata based on language of origin, countering predictions made by some previous approaches to the phonology of language mixing. My analysis combines Cophonology Theory and Agreement by Correspondence with phase faithfulness: a root is first evaluated according to the phonological grammar associated with its lexical stratum, and is then subject to faithfulness to that output.
This paper describes, analyzes, and typologically contextualizes the nasal harmony system of Tupari, an understudied Tupian language of Brazil. In this language, voiceless stops obligatorily nasalize ...when in coda position following a nasal vowel. This process superficially defies typological claims made by Walker (2000; 2003), Piggott (2003), and others about the behavior of voiceless stops in nasal harmony systems. However, I argue that coda nasalization in Tupari should be analyzed as separate from nasal spreading proper: it is driven by an independent phonotactic principle requiring that all syllabic rhymes be uniformly nasal or oral. This principle has an articulatory basis in the fact that all coda stops are unreleased in Tupari, thereby lacking a release phase in terms of Steriade’s (1993) Aperture Theory. Separating nasal harmony and coda nasalization makes testable predictions about these processes’ mutual independence—predictions confirmed by two other Brazilian languages, Awetí (Mawetí-Guaraní) and Kaingang Paulista (Jê).
This paper offers an account of diachronic changes in nasal harmony in Mundurukú, a Tupian language from Brazil. It attempts to show that the Optimality Theory provides new ways of accounting for ...sound change, other than constraint re-ranking. A comparison of Mundurukú and Kuruaya’s modern systems points out that the source system, Proto-Mundurukú, had similar properties to those currently observed in Kuruaya. In particular, nasal spread targets were voiced stops and sonorants, whereas voiceless obstruents were transparent. This system was developed into another in Pre-Mundurukú, because new contrasts were introduced in the language, turning obstruents into opaque segments, thus blocking nasalization. Formal OT account of both cases relies on restricting harmony constraints, as shown by the relative chronology that gave rise to Mundurukú’s modern system. In addition, this study discusses the consequences of this change to synchronic grammar, and how it explains the process’ irregularities.
This paper attempts to trace the historical sequence of events that led to the synchronic pattern of nasal harmony in Mundurukú (Tupi), motivated by the idea that historical information can play a ...central role in explaining synchronic properties of grammars. The diachrony of this phenomenon explains two unusual features of the modern stage of Mundurukú: (i) a specific constraint where /d/ (from * L), but not other oral stops, is only followed by oral vowels, even in nasal harmony domains; and (ii) a dialect split where reflexes of *Lin the context just referred to are /d/ in one dialect but /n/ in another. These two unusual features of Mundurukú are not shared by Kuruaya, which has a harmony system similar to that reconstructed for Proto-Mundurukú. The success of this study in illuminating language-specific aspects of Mundurukú nasal harmony supports more general approaches in which natural and unnatural sound patterns are explained in historical terms.
PDF
