Locality and the nature of nasal harmony

There is a general consensus in phonology that relations conform to a locality requirement imposing a strict adjacency condition on related entities. One pattern of nasal harmony adheres to this condition; nasality extends over a sequence of segments that may include vowels, semivowels, liquids, nasals and fricatives, and no segments can be skipped. In another pattern, locality appears to be violated, because obstruents are invariably transparent. This paper proposes a novel solution to the locality problem posed by the latter by advancing a theory in which nasality always spreads locally either at the segmental level or at the level of the heads/nucleus of syllables. The apparent skipping of obstruents arises in the second mode of spreading, a type of vowel harmony. The analysis attributes the obligatory nasalisation of sonorant consonants when harmony is the nucleus-to-nucleus type to an independent principle of Syllable Nasalisation, which is necessarily in effect when Nasal is a syllabic feature.

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