On the ‘syllabicity’ and ‘non–syllabicity’of the nasal /m/in xhosa noun class prefixes: An optimality account

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size A synchronic survey of Xhosa nominal class prefixes, viz. 1 and 3, on the one hand, and 4 and 6 on the other; shows an interesting variation. In classes 1 and 3 the bilabial nasal of the prefix is devoid of the prefixal vowel and is syllabic while, on the other hand the same nasal occurs with a vowel in classes 4 and 6 and is thus an onset. In this paper it is argued that since linguistic investigations are assumed to be synchronic (Lyons 1968), then the variation in question should be borne out by a theoretical evidence which is independent of the historical changes. The central point of the argument is that Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is capable of demonstrating that the variation in question stems from a systematic linguistic mechanism of filtering out ill-formed structures while at the same time licensing the occurrence of the well-formed ones.