Attenuated Spreading in Sanskrit Retroflex Harmony

Abstract

Drawing on a two-million-word corpus of Sanskrit, the article documents and analyzes two previously unrecognized generalizations concerning the morphoprosodic conditioning of retroflex spreading ( nati). Both reveal harmony to be attenuated across the left boundaries of roots (i.e., between a prefix and a 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 Harmonic Grammar. The article also simplifies the core analysis of the spreading rule, primarily through recognizing FLAPOUT, an articulatorily grounded constraint.