Opaque Nasalization in the Lingua do Pe of Salvador, Brasil

Abstract

We examine the pattern of opaque nasalization in two invented language games, as played by volunteers who were native speakers of the dialect of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Salvador, Brasil. One group of speakers, on whom we focus here, showed an Opaque pattern, in which nasalization over-applied in the reduplicative language game Li'ngua do Pefl but under-applied in the infixing language game Li'ngua do Ki. These results have three consequences: (i) they provide further support for an abstract Multiprecedence-and-Linearization representation (e.g. Raimy 2000a,b) for reduplication and infixation; (ii) they demonstrate that nasalization is an active rule, and not simply a lexicalized pattern; (iii) they provide support for a novel condition on rule application: the iota-operator of Russell (1905), which imposes a uniqueness condition on structural descriptions.