Description
TitleRetroflex harmony in Kalasha: agreement or spreading?
PublisherAmherst, Mass. : Graduate Linguistics Student Association, University of Massachusetts
Date Created2011
Extent12 p.
DescriptionIn this paper we investigate co-occurrence restrictions on coronal obstruents in Kalasha, an Indo-Aryan language with contrastive retroflexion in three manners of articulation: stops, affricates and fricatives. Our study reveals that Kalasha roots exhibit a pattern of retroflex consonant harmony that is sensitive to the similarity of coronals in terms of their manner of articulation. Stops harmonize with stops, affricates with affricates, and fricatives with fricatives. We evaluate two current theories of consonant harmony in light of this finding: local feature spreading (Gafos 1999) and long distance agreement by correspondence (Hansson 2001; Rose & Walker 2004). We argue that the data are consistent with the typology and predictions of the agreement by correspondence model, which encodes featural similarity, but are not predicted by the feature spreading model in its current form.
NoteThis research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Research Grant 416-2006-1006).
NoteArsenault, P., & Kochetov, A.(2011). Retroflex harmony in Kalasha: Agreement or spreading? In S. Lima, K. Mullin, & B. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 39). Amherst, MA: GLSA.
NoteThe definitive version of this paper is published in NELS 39: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (2011) and is available at https://www.createspace.com/3756873.
GenreConference Paper or Lecture
LanguageEnglish
CollectionRutgers Optimality Archive
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
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