Pulmonic venting and the typology of click nasality
Wm. G. Bennett
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003408
March 2017
A cross-linguistic survey of several dozen languages with clicks reveals an unexpected generalization: every language with clicks has nasal clicks. Moreover, some languages have only nasal clicks, and others require clicks to be nasal in certain contexts. Taken together, these point to an implicational universal: oral clicks imply nasal clicks. The explanation offered here is that nasal clicks are not truly [+nasal]; rather, they are clicks with a pulmonic airstream, which can be maintained only by venting excess pulmonic airflow through the nasal cavity. Given this assumption, the observed typology of oral and nasal click distribution can be derived from the relative markedness of non-pulmonic segments more generally, using a simple set of OT constraints.