Tier-selection: what we can learn from the Tukano data

[LinguList]

Tiers for nasality make definitely sense in the tukano data: just assign for every sound in a word, whether it is a sound occuring in a word that begins or contains a nasal. We can even make different kinds of nasal tiers:

• full nasal (nasal anywhere in the word, broadest tier)
• initial nasal (nasal in initial), or
• syllable-onset nasal

One can expand this ad libititum, and adapt it on a family-specific basis. For Chiense dialects, for example, we would want to assign nasality based on the offset, etc.