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A Unified Approach to Nasality and Voicing

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A Unified Approach to Nasality and Voicing 2807564011 A UNIFIED APPROACH TO NASALITY AND VOICING Kuniya Nasukawa Submitted to the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University College London University of London 2000 ProQuest Number: 10014876 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10014876 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 For Michiko Abstract This thesis proposes a merger of voicing and nasality under a single phonological feature. One main focus of this approach is a paradoxical phenomenon involving a nasal-voice affinity in Yamato Japanese. In postnasal voicing assimilation, nasals appear to be specified for voice (e.g. sin + ta-*' sinda ‘died’). On the other hand, in Lyman's Law, which allows only a single voiced obstruent in a particular domain, nasals behave as if they have no voice feature (e.g. sindo-i ‘tired’, *zindo-i). In order to resolve this paradox, I propose that nasal and voice are phonetic manifestations of the same phonological category. The different phonetic interpretations can be accommodated within a geometry-based element theory which incorporates the notion of a complement tier (Backley 1998, Backley & Takahashi 1998). When the complement of the nasal-voice element is licensed, the realisation is one of voicing. An unlicensed complement tier results in nasality. By adopting this analysis, postnasal voicing assimilation can be treated as the extension of the nasal-voice element across both positions of an NC cluster, where only the element in the second position licenses its complement tier. In addition, the transparency of nasal stops to Lyman's Law is made to follow from the element failing to license its complement tier. The validity of the proposed representations finds further support in the analysis of spontaneous prenasalisation and spontaneous velar nasalisation found in several dialects of Japanese. In accordance with the principle of Licensing Inheritance (Harris 1994, 1997), both processes are regarded as lenition of the complement tier in a prosodically weak position. This avoids the need to rely on arbitrary notions such as lexically floating nasality or nasal insertion rules which have been proposed elsewhere in the literature. Furthermore, in conjunction with the predictions of phonological licensing (Kaye 1990; Harris 1994, 1997), the representations successfully accommodate recurrent assimilatory phenomena such as nasal harmony and voicing assimilation. Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to the following people who have contributed their time and concern and have assisted me in the writing of this work. My greatest intellectual debt is to my thesis supervisor, John Harris. Without his professional guidance and unending support, little progress in this research would have been achieved. To him I also owe a debt of gratitude for his encouragement, patience and the time he spent going over this project in painstaking detail. This work also owes much to Phillip Backley for reading the entire text in its original form and providing helpful suggestions. During my years of study, he has always provided his valuable time for discussing any aspect of phonology with me. My gratitude also goes to him for encouragement, friendship and enjoyment. My gratitude also goes to the other people who have provided a stimulating academic environment during my time spent in London. I am most grateful to Toyomi Takahashi, with whom I have shared common academic interests over the years. His critical but heartful comments in the earlier stages of this project greately influenced its direction. I have also benefited greatly from fruitful discussions with Mike Davenport and Monik Charette. Thanks are also due to Neil Smith for attempting to overcome various administrative complexities and for contributing to an exciting academic environment. Furthermore, my gratitude should be addressed to Eugeniusz Cyran for his remarks on the earlier version of Chapter 4, which plays a pivotal role in this work. Additionally, my appreciation goes to Mercedes Cabrera-Abreu, Phil Harrison and Yuko Yoshida for their encouragement, reactions and beneficial comments on an earlier draft. Earlier versions of part of this work were presented at several annual meetings of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain. I would like to thank members of the audience in the conferences for their reactions and helpful suggestions. This thesis was partly completed during a period of study leave from Tohoku Gakuin University, Sendai, Japan. I am grateful to the University and my colleagues for Acknowledgements 5 their great moral support. Especially, I would like to thank Masayuki Oishi, my colleague, who has spent many hours discussing the broader issues in linguistics with me. His logical thinking and valuable criticism have influenced my arguments in various parts of this work. Finally, special thanks goes to my wife, Michiko Nasukawa who has inspired me with her great patience and constant, heartfelt encouragement. Without her undying emotional support, this work would not have been accomplished Kuniya Nasukawa London June 2000 Contents A bstract ........................................................................................................................3 Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................4 Contents........................................................................................................................6 Abbreviations and symbols ........................................................................................ 10 Chapter L Nasal-voice affinities................................................................ 12 1.1 Introduction................................................................................................12 1.2 The relation between nasal and voice ........................................................14 1.2.1 Nasal-voice paradox ........................................................................ 14 1.2.1.1 Voice in nasals....................................................................14 1.2.1.2 Nasals without v o ice..........................................................17 1.2.2 The appearance of nasality in voiced obstruents .............................. 19 1.2.2.1 Spontaneous prenasalisation ..............................................19 1.2.2.2 Spontaneous velar nasalisation......................................... 22 1.2.2.3 The appearance of nasality in verb-stem-final ^ ............... 25 1.3 An overview of this work........................................................................... 25 Chapter!. Typological aspects o f nasality and voicing..........................................28 2.1 Introduction................................................................................................28 2.2 Nasality ..................................................................................................... 28 2.2.1 The distribution of nasal-oral contrasts across different languages 28 2.2.2 Phonological phenomena in nasality ................................................30 2.3 ‘Voicing’ ......................................................................................; ........... 38 2.3.1 Introduction......................................................................................38 2.3.2 Laryngeal-source contrasts and VOT categories ..............................38 Contents 7 2.3.3 The distribution of VOT contrasts across different languages .... 39 2.3.4 Phonological phenomena in long-lead plosives ..............................41 2.3.5 Postnasal voicing ..............................................................................43 2.4 Implicational universals between nasality and long voicing le a d 44 2.5 Prenasalised ‘voiced’ plosives ...................................................................46 2.5.1 The distribution of prenasalised ‘voiced’ plosives across languages 46 2.5.2 Prenasalised plosives as a result of dynamic alternation ..................52 2.6 Summary ................................................................................................... 54 Chapter 3. The melodic architecture o f nasality y voicing and prenasality 56 3.1 Introduction............................................................................................... 56 3.2 Defining melodic prim es ........................................................................... 56 3.3 Elements..................................................................................................... 58 3.4 Nasality .....................................................................................................63 3.4.1 The characterisation of nasality ....................................................... 63 3.4.2 Problems associated with dual representations ............................... 63 3.4.3 The nasal elem ent ..........................................................................
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