Abstract
This article seeks to contribute to typology by presenting a formal comparative analysis of repair strategies used to resolve vowel hiatus in ciNsenga and chiShona. In these two languages, hiatus resolution is sensitive to phonology and morphosyntax such that hiatus resolution strategies apply differently depending on the phonological and morphosyntactic context. Across the prefix + noun stem boundary and within the Inflectional Stem, V1 undergoes “resyllabification” (Myers 1987:222) in the form of glide formation, secondary articulation and elision. An interlinguistic difference occurs when V2 is MacroStem-initial: in ciNsenga, hiatus resolution is blocked but in chiShona spreading is triggered. We follow Mudzingwa (2010) in proposing that resyllabification in chiShona is blocked at the Prosodic Stem edge by an alignment constraint (ALIGNL-PSTEM) that requires the left edge of a Prosodic Stem to align with the left edge of an onset-full syllable. We argue that resyllabification and glide epenthesis in ciNsenga are blocked when V2 is MacroStem-initial because ALIGN (ROOTVERB, L,σ,L) outranks ONSET and ALIGNL-PSTEM. Crucially, this article demonstrates that whilst vowel hiatus resolution is categorical in chiShona, it is domain-specific in ciNsenga. Keywords : CiNsenga, ChiShona, hiatus resolution, Optimality Theory, resyllabification
Highlights
Hiatus – a heterosyllabic sequence of adjacent vowels – has been a subject of considerable empirical and theoretical discussion
The relative ordering of ONSET, ALIGN (ROOTVERB, L,σ,L) and ALIGNL-PSTEM is what gives rise to the difference between ciNsenga and chiShona with respect to how the two languages deal with vowel hiatus across the Prosodic Stem boundary
What has been demonstrated in this article is that vocalic hiatus is dispreferred in ciNsenga and chiShona, as it is in many languages of the world
Summary
Hiatus – a heterosyllabic sequence of adjacent vowels – has been a subject of considerable empirical and theoretical discussion. Repair strategies for resolving vowel hiatus include glide formation, secondary articulation, elision, coalescence, consonant epenthesis and diphthong formation (Casali 1997, 1998, 2011; Mtenje 2007; Mudzingwa 2013; Simango and Kadenge 2014). In chiShona, hiatus in nominals – i.e. across the prefix + stem boundary – is resolved by glide formation, secondary articulation and elision (Myers 1987, Mkanganwi 1995, Mudzingwa 2010, Mudzingwa and Kadenge 2013). Comparing vowel hiatus resolution in ciNsenga and chiShona: An Optimality Theory analysis 107 two languages using the concept of ‘factorial typology’ which predicts that typological variation is a consequence of different rankings of the same set of constraints (Prince and Smolensky 2004).
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