Yaka Nasal Harmony: Spreading or Segmental Correspondence?

I argue that this kind of nasal harmony comes about through a correspondence relation between Cs in a word rather than resulting from feature spreading. This proposal will be important in explaining the characteristics in (1) and also the neutrality of ‘prenasal’ NC complexes in the language. From a broader perspective, this approach has the potential to extend to other segmental harmonies that display similar characterizing properties (Walker 1999, to appear, Rose & Walker in prep.). The analysis is couched in Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993). The paper is organized as follows. In §1 I present data illustrating Yaka nasal harmony. In §2 I bring evidence to bear on the question whether the pattern arises through correspondence or spreading, and I diagnose it as the former. §3 lays out a theoretical overview of the correspondence approach to long-distance harmony. In §4 I develop the details of the Yaka analysis, and §5 gives the conclusion.