Abstract
Vowel hiatus is dispreferred in many languages of the world. Xitsonga, an understudied cross-border southern Bantu language spoken in South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, employs a set of four hiatus resolution strategies: glide formation, secondary articulation, elision and coalescence. Glide formation is the primary repair strategy as it shows a least violation of faithfulness. In glide formation, /i/ and /u/ correspond to [j] and [w], respectively. It is blocked when V 1 is preceded by a consonant as this would incur a fatal violation of *Complex. When glide formation is blocked, secondary articulation is the next preferred option. One of the interesting features of Xitsonga is that it allows secondary articulation involving mid-vowels /o e/. OCP is often the trigger for elision, the least preferred strategy. Vowel coalescence can take two forms in Xitsonga: /a + i/ → [e] and /a + u/ → [o], both of which incur a non-fatal violation of Uniformity. When coalescence is blocked due to an impermissible sequence of /a/ and another vowel (excluding /i/ and /u/), the /a/ is elided. We argue that a single constraint hierarchy is responsible for these seemingly disjointed repair strategies. The overall significance of this paper lies in the fact that it is the first consolidated description and formal analysis of vowel hiatus resolution in Xitsonga.
Highlights
The language conforms to the norm of vowel hiatus resolution strategies in other Bantu languages, all in an effort to satisfy NO-HIATUS
Glide formation is the optimal repair strategy, as it preserves most of the features of V1
The role of Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) is vital in Xitsonga and is often the driving force behind the choice of one strategy over another
Summary
Vowel hiatus – a sequence of heterosyllabic vowels (V1.V2) – is a dispreferred configuration in many languages of the world (Casali 2011). Mudzingwa and Kadenge (2011), for example, provide an optimality-theoretic comparative analysis of hiatus resolution in two Southern Bantu languages, chiKaranga and chiNambya, with special emphasis on glide formation, secondary articulation, and elision. In both languages, glide formation is the primary strategy, followed by secondary articulation and elision. The main difference between the two languages lies in the strategy used when a coronal V1 is preceded by a consonant: chiNambya makes use of secondary articulation in the form of palatalisation, while chiKaranga (which bans palatalisation) deletes this vowel (Mudzingwa and Kadenge 2011).
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