Phonology Circle - Ryan Bennett / Anticipatory nasalization in A'ingae
Phonology Circle - Ryan Bennett / Anticipatory nasalization in A'ingae
Thursday November 14, the Phonology Circle welcomes Ryan Bennett from UC Santa Cruz and Scott AnderBois from Brown, presenting joint work with Shen Aguinda and Hugo Lucitante on "Anticipatory nasalization in A'ingae," abstracted below.
Cross-linguistically, vowels often undergo contextual nasalization in [VN] and [NV] sequences. In English, vowel nasalization in [VN] appears partial rather than categorical. Cohn (1990, 1993) influentially argued that vowels in [VN] contexts in English are phonologically unspecified for nasality (= [ø nasal]), and undergo gradient coarticulatory nasalization during phonetic implementation, differentiating them from true [+nasal] vowels (as in e.g. French /Ṽ/). In contrast, Solé (1992, 1995) argued that contextual nasalization is so extensive, controlled, and systematic in English [VN] that these vowels should be treated as phonologically [+nasal]. Phonetic differences in the extent of nasalization in English [VN] vs. French /Ṽ/ could then reflect the distinction between derived (predictable) vs. underlying (contrastive) [+nasal] vowels --- in other words, incomplete neutralization.
In this talk, I approach this debate with nasal airflow data from A'ingae, a language isolate spoken in the Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon. A'ingae has a /V Ṽ/ contrast, and a phonological process of left-to-right nasal spreading in /NV/ → [NṼ]. A'ingae also has extensive, but nonetheless partial nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] sequences. Nasalization before [N,ⁿD] is phonetically distinct from nasalization on contrastive /Ṽ/, and on nasal vowels derived by left-to-right spreading. Consequently, partial nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] cannot reflect a distinction between derived and underlying nasal vowels (= incomplete neutralization), because not all derived nasal vowels have the same phonetic profile. I also argue that nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] does not have the phonetic profile expected for phonological nasal spreading to sub-segmental units. The overall conclusion is that partial nasalization in [VN] and [VⁿD] sequences reflects underspecified nasality [ø nasal] on vowels, along with an articulated system of language-specific phonetic realization.