Vocalic context as a condition for nasal coda emergence: aerodynamic evidence

Abstract

Nasal coda emergence (NCE) (sometimes referred to as "restoration") is the process by which a nasal vowel develops an excrescent nasal coda which may or may not have been present in an earlier form of the spoken language. NCE is operative in the Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) dialect of Brazilian Portuguese (CBP), an Ibero-Romance language with five phonemically nasal vowels. The output of NCE (in this language) is usually a velar nasal. It has been suggested that the process may be a function of tongue position (Hajek 1991: 262). To test the null hypothesis that NCE does not correlate with vowel height or anteriority, aerodynamic (nasal and oral flow) signals were obtained from three speakers of CBP. The speakers uttered words ending in nasal vowels while wearing a circumferentially-vented pneumotach split-flow air mask. For comparative purposes, parallel data were gathered from a Hindi and a French speaker as well. The maximum nasal percentage of total flow and the maximum real nasal flow (in ml/s) were measured for each token, averaged across vowels and, in the case of CBP, across speakers. For CBP, the null hypothesis is rejected, lending support to the alternative: vowel height and anteriority indeed condition the emergence of NCE. This suggests a role for the lowered velum and/or raised tongue body in the development of coda obstruents on nasal vowels. IntroductionRomance philologists note the existence of a process that reverses the diachronic deletion of nasal coda consonants through emergence (sometimes called "restoration") of a nasal consonant after a nasal vowel (see Sampson 1999: 146, 150-151, 207, 260 for cross-linguistic examples, particularly in Galician and northern Italian). Sampson (1999: 260) remarks that the emergent coda is generally "of variable duration and degree of occlusion." It may also have a variable place of articulation, sometimes based on the quality of the preceding vowel.Furthermore, it has been suspected for over a century that a mysterious segment lurks at the edge of Brazilian Portuguese word-final nasal vowels (Nobiling 1903). This has provoked debate concerning the phonological status of nasal vowels in the language (Reed and Leite 1947;Morais-Barbosa 1961;Lipski 1975;Cagliari 1977;Mattoso Câmara 1977;Parkinson 1983). Nobiling (1903) was one of the first to posit an underlying nasal consonant in this position. He noted that it resembled a velar nasal consonant "without complete oral closure" (as cited in Lipski 1975: 72). The present study emphasizes the aerodynamics of nasal coda emergence (NCE) in Carioca Brazilian Portuguese (CBP) and concludes with suppositions about the articulatory conditions affecting its development. It is likely that the character of the oral occlusion in CBP is typically velar, though the issue has not been resolved, nor is it settled here (cf. Reed and Leite (1947) for a discussion of palatal and velar nasals in contrasting vocalic environments).Hajek (1991) introduces an explanation for NCE called "nasalized glide hardening." He notes that...

Palatal Complexity Revisited: An Electropalatographic Analysis of /ɲ/ in Brazilian Portuguese with Comparison to Peninsular Spanish

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Maxakalí Nasality and Field Recording with Earbud Microphony

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