Reduplicative Opacity in Malay Revisited: Preliminary Phonetic Evidence for Variable "Recopying" and BRCT

This paper reports new acoustic documentation of the interaction between nasal spreading and reduplication in Malay. Our preliminary findings confirm the existence of the putative recopying pattern reported by Onn (1976), but as part of a system of free variation. We supplement McCarthy & Prince (1995)’s Base-Reduplicant Correspondence Theory (BRCT) analysis of this pattern with partially-ordered constraints (Anttila, 1997) in order to account for the observed variation. The confirmation of the recopying pattern in Malay bolsters the argument for the inclusion of BR correspondence in reduplicative theory, as alternative serialist theories cannot generate this type of pattern.