Non-myopia in Sanskrit retroflex harmony

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 prefixes to be weak triggers in the sense that while prefixes trigger harmony, their access to targets is more restricted than that of non-prefix triggers, as analyzed here through the ‘ganging up’ of phonotactics and CrispEdge in classical HG. A (classical or serial) OT analysis using constraint conjunction, for its part, falters on the locality facts. Beyond the proposed classical HG analysis, a serial HG analysis is also possible, but only with a new type of non-local dependency constraint (cf. Mullin 2011, Walker 2014), effectively serving as memory that CrispEdge was breached earlier in the derivation. Sanskrit exhibits a consonant harmony process called nati by which retroflexion spreads progressively and at any distance from a retroflex continuant trigger to a coronal nasal target (e.g. 1a–b), assuming that no consonantal coronal intervenes to block it (1c). A trigger can occupy any morphological position, including a prefix (1d). (1) (a) √ õa:gaV-e:na → [õa:gaV-e:ïa] (b) √ õug-na → [õug-ïa] (c) √ õat-e:na → [õat-e:na] (d) põa√ Hi-no:-ti → [põa-Hi-ïo:-ti] Nati has drawn the attention of linguists for nearly three thousand years. Among generative phonologists, it has played roles in treatments of harmony, (non-)iterativity, feature geometry, autosegmentalism, and prosodic phonology (§1), and continues to inform new developments. Recently, for instance, Jardine (2014) identified nati as one of only two known segmental (as opposed to tonal) processes in the world’s languages with the potential — judging by previous descriptions — to be ‘unbounded circumambient,’ that is, sensitive to unbounded contexts on both sides (due caution is expressed on this point, however, and indeed, as §4 will show, the right-side conditioning is bounded). Hansson (2010: 189–91) identifies several respects in which nati is unusual among consonant harmony systems, including the non-overlap between triggers and target, the coronal blocking of a coronal harmony, the progressive directionality, and the (occasional) phrasal domain. To these, one might add that prefixes rarely initiate harmony cross-linguistically (Baković 2000). The present article has two goals. First, it simplifies previous analyses of the core facts of nati, primarily through incorporating into the analysis a phonetic property of retroflex stops, namely, ‘flapping out’ (i.e. releasing in a more anterior position; e.g. Boersma and Hamann 2005). Sanskrit is argued to be normal typologically in that its retroflex stops flap out, while its retroflex continuants do not. This constraint explains a number of at