Austronesian Nasal Substitution and Other NC Effects
 

Joe Pater

McGill University





The paper analyzes Indonesian/Malay nasal substitution (i.e. 
 meN+pilih -> memilih, but meN+beli -> membeli) as fusion of 
 the nasal and voiceless obstruent, driven by a phonetically 
 motivated constraint that disallows nasal/voiceless obstruent 
 clusters (*NC). Through reranking *NC with faithfulness 
 constraints, a typology of NC effects, including nasal deletion, 
 post-nasal voicing, and denasalization, is produced.
 Particularly striking evidence for the need to formally express 
 the relationship between these processes is provided by conspiracies 
 between NC effects, where *NC is satisfied in one way in one 
 environment (e.g. post-nasal voicing word-medially), and in another 
 way in another context(e.g. nasal substitution word-initially).
 Topics of more general concern dealt with in the paper include 
 the formulation of segmental and featural faithfulness constraints in 
 the Correspondence Theory of McCarthy and Prince (1995), as well as 
 the influence of morphology on non-prosodic phonology.