Word Prosody and the Distribution of Oral/Nasal Contour Consonants in Kaingang'

This paper examines the contour consonants of Kaingang. It does not address the issue of their underlying representation, although it is assumed, in line with general practice, that the contour property itself is not phonologically distinctive, but a surface (phonetic) phenomenon. Instead, it contains a discussion of the distribution of the different contour types ([mb], [bm], [bmb]) that this language possesses, in which it is shown that their surface occurrence is indicative of Kaingang prosodic structure, in which the concepts of tauto-syllabicity, ambisyllabicity, and extrasyl-labicity, as well as the interaction between syllable structure and word structure play an explicative role