ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the nasal agreement data in diminutive prefixation and present arguments that it is not nasal spreading and should instead be regarded as reduplication. Independent evidence for the nasal agreement phenomenon as a case of nasal copy comes from a pattern of reduplication occurring in imperative verbs in Mbe. Mbe is a Benue-Congo language spoken in the Ogoja Province of Eastern Nigeria. The phenomenon and other aspects of Mbe morphology are described in a series of papers by Bamgbose. Verbs in Mbe are categorized as Class 1 or Class 2, corresponding to the particular form of affixation or reduplication that takes place in verbal inflection. Imperative verbs can be either simple or reduplicated. The chapter examines a nasal agreement phenomenon occurring in certain Bantu languages. The Bantu nasalization resembles cooccurrence restrictions of certain other languages concerns the set of segments targeted by the restriction.
