UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9 (1997)
Melodic structure in a nasal-voice
paradox
KUNIYA NASUKAWA
This paper addresses the apparently paradoxical behaviour of nasals in Yamato Japanese,
where
voice is active for nasals in postnasal voicing but inactive in Rendaku (Itô et
al 1995). In order to
explain this paradox, I propose that the two primes conventionally used to denote nasality and
voicing are identical, and that the difference is determined by the notion of headship: the
headed
prime contributes voicing, and its headless counterpart manifests itself as nasality. These
proposals
are presented within the context of Element Theory (Kaye et al. 1985; Harris
& Lindsey 1995),
where output representations are redundancy-free, refer only to privative primes, and are fully
interpretable.
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