Resolving Hiatus in Kinyarwanda Morphology

Abstract

When two vowels are adjacent across a morpheme boundary, several ways of avoiding vowel hiatus are invoked; vowel gliding whereby either vowel becomes a glide, vowel coalescence where two vowels are fused together to become a third vowel and vowel deletion in which a less sonorous vowel is elided. As in other Bantu languages, in Kinyarwanda spoken in Rwanda and Burundi, vowel clash is resolved by various ways. Of particular interest is vowel coalescence which well conforms to serialism-oriented Optimality Theory(OT). To avoid an onsetless syllable, two steps of root node deletion followed by floating feature sharing are split off under two core principle of local optimality and gradualness. Furthermore, vowel elision is preferred when vowel gliding results in a complex onset, which incurs in OCP violation. In essence, the analysis provided here approves that serial OT can be extended and applied to the vowel phonology of hiatus resolution.