Please join us on Monday, April 20, at 10am for a talk by Sam Zukoff.

Resolving Reduplicative Opacity in Malay Nasal Spreading: An Argument for Base-Reduplicant Correspondence Theory (joint work with Jian-Leat Siah and Feng-fan Hsieh)

In Malay (Austronesian), nasality spreads iteratively rightward from nasal consonants to following vowels and glides, but is blocked by supralaryngeal consonants. In reduplicated forms, Onn (1976) reported overapplication of nasal spreading (e.g., [w̃ãŋĩ-w̃ãŋĩ]): the first syllable of the reduplicant acquires nasality even though there is no local trigger preceding it. This pattern carries significant theoretical implications because only parallelist (McCarthy & Prince 1995) but not serial/derivational theories of reduplication (Inkelas & Zoll 2005; Kiparsky 2010; McCarthy et al. 2012) can account for it. In this talk, we present acoustic data from 30 native speakers of Malay showing that nasal spreading in reduplication displays substantial variation both within and across individuals. In reduplicated words such as /abaŋ-abaŋ/ ‘brothers’, all logically possible combinations of oral and nasal realizations were attested, including underapplication ([abaŋ-abaŋ]), normal application ([abaŋ-ãbaŋ]), unmotivated “pathological” application ([ãbaŋ-abaŋ]), and crucially, overapplication ([ãbaŋ-ãbaŋ]). Of these, overapplication emerged as the most frequent variant, corroborating Onn’s (1976) descriptive observations and providing support to parallelist theories of reduplication. The study further reveals a phonetic correspondence effect, whereby vowels in the reduplicant and base tend to exhibit matching degrees of nasality/orality. To capture these variable and gradient patterns, we develop a constraint-based model within the framework of generative phonetics, in which constraint violations are assessed scalarly rather than categorically (Flemming 2001; Lefkowitz 2017). The model achieves a strong fit to the experimental data, demonstrating how integrating phonetic detail into a formal grammar can shed new light on longstanding questions at the morphology-phonology interface.”