Attenuated Spreading in Sanskrit Retroflex Harmony

Abstract

Drawing on a two-million-word corpus of Sanskrit, two previously unrecognized generalizations are documented and analyzed concerning the morpho-prosodic conditioning of retroflex spreading (nati). Both reveal harmony to be attenuated across the left boundaries of roots (i.e. between a prefix and root or between members of a compound), in the sense that while harmony applies across these boundaries, when it does so, it accesses a proper subset of the targets otherwise accessible. This attenuation is analyzed here through the ‘ganging up’ of phonotactics and output-output correspondence in serial HG. The article also simplifies the core analysis of the spreading rule, primarily through recognizing FlapOut, an articulatorily grounded constraint.