On the Representation of NC Clusters in Bemba Nancy Chongo Kula 1. Introduction In this paper I aim to provide an analysis of Nasal Consonant clusters. In attempting to derive the facts of nasal place assimilation two views of Nasal Consonant clusters (NC's henceforth) have evolved, namely; as a unit segment, complex segment or nasal contour, on the one hand, and as sequences of segments on the other. To account for NC's as attested in Bemba, I propose an analysis of NC clusters, in the framework of Government Phonology (GP) (Kaye, Lowenstamm and Vergnaud, 1985, 1990) as sequences of consonants employing onset to onset government and licensing constraints. The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2 presents the phonological behaviour of NC's in Bemba, Section 3 gives some proposals that have been made for the representation of NC's, in Section 4 I give a brief background of Government Phonology, followed by my analysis and proposal's and Section 5 offers some concluding remarks. 2. Phonological behaviour of NC's in Bemba The only consonant clusters found in Bemba, 1 as in many other Bantu languages, either involve 'semi-vowels', or a nasal and a homorganic consonant. 2 In order to motivate the structure I propose for NC's in Bemba, I present four relevant environments; assimilation, strengthening of consonants, NC simplification, and nasal consonant harmony (2.1-2.4). 2.1 Homorganicity In Bemba the nasal in NC's is homorganic to the following consonant. This follows from the notion that nasals are typically placeless consonants that need to share a place of articulation with a following consonant as long as it is available. This can be seen with the 1st person singular prefix n- when followed by different stem- initial consonants: Linguistics in the Netherlands 1999, 135–148. DOI 10.1075/avt.l6.13kul ISSN 0929–7332 / E-ISSN 1569-9919 © Algemene Vereniging voor Taalwetenschap