Shona morphophonemics : repair strategies in Karanga and Zezuru

Abstract

This book examines the repair strategies that Karanga and Zezuru, two dialects of Shona, a Bantu language, employ to achieve the CV syllable and the disyllabic Prosodic Word—preferred phonological structures in Shona. Often morpheme concatenation creates phonological structures that do not conform to these preferred structures. The overall analysis is couched in Optimality Theory. Hiatus resolution strategies are conditioned by prosodic domains; consequently, a detailed prosodic parsing is required. The relevant domains are The Prosodic Stem, Prosodic Word and the Clitic Group. Owing to the impossibility of unifying cliticization and coalescence facts with the other strategies in a single constraint ranking, two strata are posited—the Word (lexical) and the Postlexical using the Lexical Phonology and Morphology-Optimality Theory (Kiparsky 2000). Glide formation is the default strategy at the Word level and coalescence at the Postlexical. All the hiatus-breakers in Karanga and Zezuru, [j w ʔ ɦ], are analyzed as products of spreading. In minimality, Zezuru enforces Word Minimality at the expense of Onset, and Karanga enforces Onset at the expense of Word Minimality.