Brazil

This paper explores the world of nasality in the Mamainde language, in particular, the nasal coda segment. In some environments, simple nasals can be realized as pre-stopped nasal segments, where a stop is inserted before the nasal coda. These nasals also get their place features from the previous vowel.

I propose a new family of constraints to deal with these problems-the Identical Rhyme Constraints (IRC). These constraints require both the nucleus and the coda to share the same features for nasality/orality (the IRCNasal), as well as identical features in place (the IRCPlace).

Along the way, some other controversial topics are discussed, including binary features of nasality, underspecification of vowel features, and a rethinking of how vowel and consonant features interact. A constraint ranking is proposed and a number of tableaus are given as examples. The end result is that in both the nasal/oral features and the place features, the vowels dominate the articulation of coda consonants in this language.