Attenuated Spreading in Sanskrit Retroflex Harmony

Abstract

Drawing on a two-million-word corpus of Sanskrit, the article documents and analyzes two previously unrecognized generalizations concerning the morphoprosodic conditioning of retroflex spreading (nati). Both reveal harmony to be attenuated across the left boundaries of roots (i.e., between a prefix and a root or between members of a compound), in the sense that while harmony applies across these boundaries, when it does so, it accesses a proper subset of the targets otherwise accessible. This attenuation is analyzed here through the 'ganging up' of phonotactics and output-output correspondence in serial Harmonic Grammar. The article also simplifies the core analysis of the spreading rule, primarily through recognizing FlapOut, an articulatorily grounded constraint.Sanskrit exhibits a consonant harmony process called nati by which retroflexion spreads progressively and at any distance from a retroflex continuant trigger to a coronal nasal target (e.g., 1a-b), assuming that no consonantal coronal intervenes to block it (1c). A trigger can occupy any morphological position, including a prefix (1d).(1) (a)Nati has drawn the attention of linguists for nearly three thousand years. Among generative phonologists, it has played significant roles in treatments of harmony, (non-)iterativity, feature geometry, autosegmentalism, and prosodic phonology (section 1), and it continues to inform new developments. Recently, for instance, Jardine (2014) identified nati as one of only two known segmental (as opposed to tonal) processes in the world's languages with the potential to be 'unbounded circumambient', that is, sensitive to unbounded contexts on both sides of the target (see section 4). Hansson (2010: 189-91) identifies several respects in which nati is unusual among consonant harmony systems, including the nonoverlap between triggers and target, the coronal blocking of a coronal harmony, the progressive directionality, and the (occasional) phrasal domain. One might add that prefixes rarely initiate harmony crosslinguistically (Baković 2000, Hyman 2002, Krämer 2003, Kenstowicz 2009).The present article has two goals. First, it simplifies previous analyses of the core facts of nati, primarily through incorporating into the analysis a phonetic property of retroflex stops, namely, 'flapping out' (i.e. releasing in a more anterior position). Sanskrit is argued * Parts of this article were presented at the 12th Old World Conference in Phonology and the Harvard Indo-European Workshop. I gratefully acknowledge the suggestions and criticisms of those audiences, Dieter Gunkel, Joe Pater, Rachel Walker, the reviewers, and the editors.

Computationally, tone is different

“…In Sanskrit n -retroflexion (Whitney 1889, Macdonell 1910, Schein & Steriade 1986, Hansson 2001, Graf 2010, Ryan forthcoming), an underlying alveolar /n/ becomes retroflex [ɳ] after retroflex /r ᶳ/, which can appear far to the left of the target /n/. Both trigger and target in (22), from Hansson (2011: 225), are underlined.…”

Gurindji nasal cluster dissimilation as trigger deletion

“…In addition to the Romanian pattern summarized above, there are several other cases that have a non-myopic character, in that full application of an unbounded spreading process depends on the satisfaction of other constraints. (For discussion of additional patterns that bear a less close relation to the cases already discussed, see Walker 2014 and Ryan 2017 on non-local trigger–target relations.) In these four remaining cases, spreading only occurs if the spreading feature succeeds in reaching some targeted position over the course of the derivation.…”

Unbounded circumambient patterns in segmental phonology

“…Jardine (2016: §5.4) acknowledges two attested cases of apparent unbounded circumambience in segmental phonology, Sanskrit n -retroflexion (Ryan 2017) and Yaka height harmony (Hyman 1998). He does not consider them equivalent to tonal patterns, however, claiming that such segmental patterns are ‘extremely rare’.…”