| Abstract: | In this paper we investigate co-occurrence restrictions on coronal obstruents in Kalasha, an Indo-Aryan language with contrastive retroflexion in three manners of articulation: stops, affricates and fricatives. Our study reveals that Kalasha roots exhibit a pattern of retroflex consonant harmony that is sensitive to the similarity of coronals in terms of their manner of articulation. Stops harmonize with stops, affricates with affricates, and fricatives with fricatives. We evaluate two current theories of consonant harmony in light of this finding: local feature spreading (Gafos 1999) and long distance agreement by correspondence (Hansson 2001; Rose & Walker 2004). We argue that the data are consistent with the typology and predictions of the agreement by correspondence model, which encodes featural similarity, but are not predicted by the feature spreading model in its current form. |
