Spelling out the Kirundi augment

Abstract


 The Kirundi augment is a vowel found before noun class prefixes. I argue that the augment is an epenthetic vowel whose surface characteristics, including deletion, retention and weight, are conditioned by prosodic structure. While the augments of different noun classes present apparent asymmetries, my account unifies all surface representations under a single underlying structure. My arguments mainly focus on three nominal structures: simple nominals (syntactically φP), locative phrases (PP) and linker phrases (KP). I draw on the argument that both nP and DP are syntactic phases that correspond to prosodic words, as well as the observation that epenthetic vowels commonly pattern as weightless to quantity-sensitive phonological processes.