ABSTRACT
In this chapter I examine two cases of nasal agreement which may at first be mistaken for nasal spreading but I argue have properties identifying them as other kinds of phonological phenomena. The first is a case of nasal agreement in Mbe affixation (Bamgbose 1971), which I show to be an example of reduplication. Evidence for this conclusion is compiled both cross-linguistically and on the basis of a detailed analysis of various morpho-phonological phenomena in the language. The second is a condition of long-distance nasal agreement holding within and across morphemes in certain Bantu languages (Ao 1991; Odden 1994; Hyman 1995; Piggott 1996). I claim that this should be classified as an example of a cooccurrence restriction, paralleling a set of other languages in which cooccurrence restrictions over segments having similar but different properties are resolved by substitution of an identical feature rather than dissimilation. The direction for the cooccurrence analysis is sketched and the details are left for further research.
