Workshop: PhN3

The Phonology of Nasals, Nasality and Nasalization across Languages

Our workshop aims to bring together phonologists from different theoretical perspectives and approaches interested in the study of nasality and nasalization processes in many linguistic families.

We invite proposals for 30-minute talks (including discussion) from the perspective of synchronic grammar, sound change, or phonological typology, on both representational and computational aspects of nasality, such as:

- location of nasality, dependency / asymmetric relations,

- constraints on nasal contrasts, contrast preservation,

- nasal contours: prenasalized consonants, preconsonantal nasals, nasal geminates,

- word-final nasals,

- the prosodic weight of nasality,

- nasality and tone: tonal effects on the nasal feature,

- nasal vowels and nasalization rules,

- harmonic patterns: domains, triggers, direction of nasalization,

- nasal cluster dissimilation (nasal-stop clusters) or assimilation (rhotic-nasal clusters),

- nasal deletion or nasal substitution,

- the relationship between voice and nasality,

- etc.

Keynote speaker for this session: Juliet Stanton (New York University) - Postnasal devoicing as contrast enhancement

Postnasal voicing, where an underlying voiceless nasal-stop sequence is mapped to a voiced nasal-stop sequence (NT > ND), is a common process that has a well-known phonetic motivation (e.g. Pater 1999, Hayes & Stivers 2000). The converse of postnasal voicing, postnasal devoicing (ND > NT), is uncommon and often claimed to be phonetically unnatural (e.g. Beguš 2019). In this talk I argue against this characterization by showing that postnasal devoicing is perceptually advantageous. The idea (following Stanton 2017) is that, all else being equal, the contrast between a nasal (N) and ND is less distinct than a contrast between N and NT. Speakers employ post-nasal devoicing as a form of enhancement, in order to render the N-ND contrast more distinct.

Evidence for this claim comes from a perception study, which has two main results. First, the N-NT contrast is more distinguishable than the N-ND contrast, both prevocalically and word-finally. Second, both the N-ND and N-NT contrasts are more distinguishable prevocalically than they are word-finally. I demonstrate that this second finding has parallels in the typology of PND: prevocalic PND entails word-final PND. I present an analysis of PND that references auditory factors and show that it can be easily extended to account for other post-nasal laryngeal alternations, such as post-nasal aspiration (see Downing & Hamann 2021). Time permitting, I discuss points of intersection with and differences between the present proposal and those of Beguš (2019) and Downing & Hamann (2021).