The violability of backness in retroflex consonants Paul Boersma University of Amsterdam Silke Hamann ZAS Berlin February 11, 2005 Abstract This paper addresses remarks made by Flemming (2003) to the effect that his analysis of the interaction between retroflexion and vowel backness is superior to that of Hamann (2003b). While Hamann maintained that retroflex articulations are always back, Flemming adduces phonological as well as phonetic evidence to prove that retroflex consonants can be non-back and even front (i.e. palatalised). The present paper, however, shows that the phonetic evidence fails under closer scrutiny. A closer consideration of the phonological evidence shows, by making a principled distinction between articulatory and perceptual drives, that a reanalysis of Flemming’s data in terms of unviolated retroflex backness is not only possible but also simpler with respect to the number of language-specific stipulations. 1 Introduction This paper is a reply to Flemming’s article “The relationship between coronal place and vowel backness” in Phonology 20.3 (2003). In a footnote (p. 342), Flemming states that “a key difference from the present proposal is that Hamann (2003b) employs inviolable articulatory constraints, whereas it is a central thesis of this paper that the constraints relating coronal place to tongue-body backness are violable”. The only such constraint that is violable for Flemming but inviolable for Hamann is the constraint that requires retroflex coronals to be articulated with a back tongue body. Flemming expresses this as the violable constraint RETRO→ B ACK , or RETRO→BACKCLO if it only requires that the closing phase of a retroflex consonant be articulated with a back tongue body. One of the main points made by Hamann (2003b), by contrast, is that tongue-body retraction is a necessary concomitant of apico-postalveolar and apico-palatal articulations; Hamann implements this necessity as a restriction enforced by GEN, i.e. articulatory candidates that combine a retroflex tongue tip with a non-back tongue body do not appear in tableaus. The ‘key difference’ between Hamann’s and Flemming’s approaches can indeed be simplified as the difference between regarding RETRO→BACK(CLO) as violable or as inviolable constraints. Flemming adduces two kinds of evidence for the violability of RETRO→BACK and even RETRO→BACKCLO: linguistic and phonetic. The linguistic evidence consists of his analyses of several languages where the release phase of