Resolving Hiatus

Roderic F. Casali

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781136763076
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1998. Part of the Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics series, this work looks at the analysis of elision directionaility and the correlation between the active value of (ATR) in a language and the language's vowel inventory.  The paper develops the idea of ATR Predictability.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

1.1 HIATUS RESOLUTION STRATEGIES

There are a variety of ways in which languages deal with sequences of vowels that arise through morphological or syntactic concatenation. One alternative of course is to leave the sequence unchanged and syllabify the two vowels into separate syllables, a possibility we may refer to as heterosyllabification. Many languages do not readily tolerate adjacent heterosyllabic vowels, however. In languages which do not, a vowel sequence may be subject to any one of several possible hiatus resolution strategies. These include syllabifying the two vowels into the nucleus of a single syllable (diphthong formation), epenthesis of an intervening consonant, vowel elision, glide formation (here used exclusively to refer to a process in which the first of two adjacent vowels surfaces as a semivowel), and coalescence (here defined, following Bergman (1968), as a situation in which an underlying /V₁+V₂/ sequence is realized as a third vowel sharing features of both V₁ and V₂). These are schematized in (1). (The parenthesized colon indicates that vowel elision, glide formation, and coalescence may occur with or without compensatory lengthening, depending on the particular language.)

(1)

Heterosyllabification:	CV1+V2 > .CV1.V2.
Diphthong formation:	CV1+V2 > .CV1V2.
Epenthesis:	CV1+V2 > .CV1.CV2.

Glide formation:	CV1+V2 > .CGV2(:).
Coalescence:	CV1+V2 > .CV3(:).

Some examples of these processes in various languages are given in (2).

(2) Heterosyllabification (English):

a. ple ɪnsaɪd	→	.ple.ɪn.saɪd.
		'play inside'
b. go əwe	→	.go.ə.we.
		'go away'

Diphthong formation (Ngiti: Lojenga 1994b):

c. izo ɔkʊ	→	.i.z°ɔ.kʊ.
reed sugarcane		(type of sugar cane)
d. ngbangba ɔdzɔ	→	.ngba.ngb^aɔ.dzɔ.
child dry thing		'dwarf'

Epenthesis (Axininca: Payne 1981):

e. no-N-pisi-i	→	.nom.pi.si.ti.
		'I will sweep'
f. no-N-piyo-i	→	.nom.pi.yo.ti.
		'I will heap'

Vowel elision (Etsako: Elimelech 1976):

g. dε akpa	→	.da.kpa.
buy cup		'buy a cup'
h. ukpo εnodε	→	.u.kpε.no.dε.
cloth yesterday		'yesterday's cloth'

Glide formation (LuGanda: Clements 1986):

i. li-ato	→	.lyaa.to.
		'boat'
j. mu-iko	→	.mwii.ko.
		'trowel'

Coalescence (Anufo: Adjekum, Holman & Holman 1993):

k. fa-i	→	.fε:.
		'take it'
l. fa-u	→	.fɔ:.
		'take you'

These processes can, and frequently do, co-occur in a language. There are quite a few Niger-Congo languages in fact in which some sequences are resolved by vowel elision, others by glide formation, and still others by coalescence. This is the case for example in Chumburung (Snider 1985, 1989c), Nawuri (Casali 1988, 1995c), and Xhosa (Aoki 1974, McLaren 1955).

The present study deals with cross-linguistic variation in the behavior of two of these processes, vowel elision and coalescence. These processes have been the subject of many language-specific studies, for example Aoki (1974), Bunkowske (1972), Casali (1988), Clements (1986), Donwa-Ifode (1985), Hoffman (1972), Masagbor (1989), Pulleyblank (1988), Snider (1985, 1989c). Cross-linguistic studies of these processes, on the other hand, have been rare. It turns out that when the range of variation exhibited by elision and coalescence across languages is examined, there are some surprising and interesting restrictions on their behavior, such that a number of seemingly very plausible patterns which these processes might (from the viewpoint of virtually all current theories) be expected to exhibit are apparently unattested. To cite just a single example, we may note that languages which regularly elide the second (rightmost) of two vowels that come together across a word boundary do not seem to exist. My goal is to provide a principled account of these cross-linguistic restrictions within the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Prince & Smolensky 1993).

While other possible hiatus outcomes, i.e. heterosyllabification, diphthong formation, epenthesis, and glide formation, will be discussed at various points, their treatment will not be very detailed and a number of important questions pertaining to these realization strategies will be left unaddressed.¹

1.2 EMPIRICAL BASIS OF THE STUDY

The generalizations discussed in this study are based on a survey of 92 languages that display at least some instances of elision and/or coalescence. The information on these languages was collected from published and unpublished sources over a period of about five years (1990-1995). Because my interest in these processes grew out of my own exposure to West African languages, the survey originally consisted almost entirely of Niger-Congo languages. Later, it was expanded to include languages from other families as well. The genetic representation of the languages in my database is summarized in (3).

(3)

Language family	Languages
Af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Vowel Elision
• Chapter 3: Coalescence and Feature-Sensitive Elision
• Chapter 4: Height Coalescence
• Chapter 5: Height Coalescence and Theories of Vowel Height
• Chapter 6: An Analysis of Height Coalescence
• Chapter 7: An Approach to Height Feature Specification
• Bibliography
• Index