On Triggers and Opacity in Coronal Harmony

0. Introduction This study documents and analyzes opacity in the coronal harmony of Kinyarwanda. This harmony presents several features of interest. First, the existence of opacity in coronal harmony is rare: to the best of our knowledge it has only previously been reported in Sanskrit’s nasal retroflex harmony. In Kinyarwanda the harmony audibly affects only sibilants, and it is blocked by coronal stops, palatals and the alveolar affricate, but not the coronal liquid. Our study also finds that the assimilating property in Kinyarwanda is a retroflexion articulation, rather than an (alveo-)palatal one as described in previous studies. In addition, the harmony is obligatory in adjacent syllables, but it is optional over longer spans. We argue that Kinyarwanda’s harmony involves feature spreading, rather than feature agreement by correspondence. Also, a comparison of retroflex harmony in Kinyarwanda and Sanskrit reveals how Kinyarwanda enlarges the perspective on coronal harmony systems with blocking. The organization of this paper is as follows. §1 describes Kinyarwanda’s coronal harmony. In §2 we develop our analysis, and in §3 we compare Sanskrit’s retroflex harmony. In §4 we discuss typological and theoretical issues and identify topics for further research.