The interface of stress and nasality in tupí-guaraní languages in a historical perspective

Abstract

We discuss data from a range of Tupí-Guaraní languages seeking for foundations for the hypothesis under which in early stages of the Tupí-Guaraní family stress would have interacted with [+/- nasal] prosodic features yielding, among other things, patterns of nasal and post-oralized nasal consonants in the phonetic output of phonological words. Our hypothesis also states that the present day distribution of fully nasal, post-oralized nasal and voiced oral consonants across languages of different subbranches is the result of adjustments in the action’s scope of such interface, oriented by principles of balanced symmetry between oral and nasal patterns.