A Phonological Appraisal of Hiatus in Nzema Syllabic System
Keywords:
Nzema, Hiatus, Coalescence, Epenthesis, Optimality TheoryAbstract
Hiatus is a phonological phenomenon in which two different vowels occur in a juxtaposition without an intervening consonant. This configuration is unacceptable in several languages, therefore, specific phonological strategies are required to break the cluster. Nzema does not readily permit adjacent hetero-syllabic vowels and thus employs strategies to resolve them. This paper examines how Nzema resolves vowel hiatus through epenthesis and coalescence. Data for the study were collected from four native speakers through interviews. The study dwells on Optimality Theory for the analysis. It finds that, in Nzema, coalesced vowels always preserve their [-high] and [-round] features in the resultant vowel. With respect to epenthesis, a consonant is triggered by an adjacent high vowel, which in turn spreads its feature to harmonise with the consonant, be it coronal or labial. This, however, occurs within individual words and not at the word boundary. This paper therefore, contributes to the limited existing literature on Nzema phonology and expands the discussion of unacceptable v-v sequences in general.
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