Nasal Spreading as Defective Gestural Deactivation

Nasal spreading (also called nasal vowel-consonant harmony) is a process by which a nasal segment in a word triggers nasalization of its surrounding segments. This paper proposes a reanalysis of this phenomenon using gestures as the units of phonological representation in order to more accurately capture its crosslinguistic typological patterns. Nasal spreading proceeds unboundedly, potentially resulting in spreading of nasality throughout an entire word. However, it is also common for the spread of nasality to be arrested by glides, liquids, or obstruents, a property known as blocking. This is exemplified in Warao (isolate; Venezuela), in which nasality spreads progressively from a triggering nasal consonant or vowel, affecting following vowels, glides, and glottal consonants (1a-d) but is arrested by liquids and obstruents, as in (1e-h) (Osborn 1966):