Kekangan penggabungan nasal-obstruen letupan bersuara dalam Bahasa Melayu standard

This article discusses the blocking of the phonological process i.e. nasal substitution on nasal and voiced plosive clusters. Phonetically, nasal and voiceless plosive obstruent clusters cause difficulty to the articulation system in its production. The clusters are not allowed to emerge in the surface representation in Malay and other languages particularly Austronesian languages. To prevent these clusters from emerging in the surface form, nasal substitution is applied. Observation of a million words obtained from the DBP-UKM corpus confirms that the phonological process of voiced obstruent nasal substitution does not occur in standard Malay. This article will discusses why voiced plosive obstruents after nasal segments do not undergo nasal substitution. This study is based on constraint-hierarchy i.e. Optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), which proposes that the blocking of voiced plosive obstruent nasal substitution is due to the constraint named IDENT[PHAREXP].