Feature sensitive and context [in-]-sensitive glide formation and coalescence in hiatus resolution in isiNdebele

Abstract

This paper argues for context and vowel-feature sensitive repair of hiatal configuration in isiNdebele, a Bantu language largely spoken in southern parts of Zimbabwe as well as parts of South Africa. Bantu languages by and large phonologically and/or phonetically repair vowel hiatus configurations arising from both phonological and morphophonological concatenations. The phonology of isiNdebele seems to largely favour an analysis that does not permit the surface realisation of clusters of segments of the form VV (vowel-vowel clusters). Observing such an analysis, which this paper argues to be largely ONSET motivated/triggered and the featural properties of the phonological structures of the languages under study, their reactions to such disprefered vowel clusters and their phonotactics are here examined within the framework of Optimkty Theory (OT) as enunciated by Prince and Smolensky (1991, 1993), McCarthy and Prince (1999), Archangeli (1997) and Kager (1999) as well as Distinctive Features as discussed by Chomsky and Halle (1963). Repair strategies for such configurations such as glide formation, consonantal and/or glide insertions, vowel deletion and coalescence are discussed. The analysis adopted here implicates that the resolution of these disprefered configurations arises from incompatibilities in the features of the vowels straddling a word boundary. It argues that these repair strategies are largely motivated by language internal constraint ranking systems which in Bantu languages seem to largely prefer the preservation of [-] features over [-F] features i.e. the ranking [- F']>>[+ F']1