ABSTRACT
Spreading of melody elements to adjacent skeleton positions is possible, but nonadjacent positions are inaccessible whenever other associated melody elements intervene. A reduplication-specific operation of melody copying is no longer needed, since the skeleton of the reduplicative morpheme can be directly associated with the root melody. The empirical arguments for Tier Conflation derive from its melody rewriting properties. Nasal Substitution is a melody-plane rule spreading the nasal feature onto the melodic core of a following consonant. Dakota has a rule of Velar Palatalization by which the voiceless velar stops are fronted to their corresponding palatals after the front vowels i and e, as indicated. An instructive example of overapplication is presented by the Sanskrit ruki rule which retroflexes s to s after r, after velar stops, and after the high vowels i and u. Madurese has several kinds of reduplication. The "overcopying" of prefixal material that we find in can be formally understood as the overapplication of onset formation in reduplicative structures.
