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Rethinking the Interaction between Glide Formation and Vowel Elision in Edoid Languages
Philip Oghenesuowho Ekiugbo
Department of Linguistics, National Institute for Nigerian Languages, Aba, Nigeria
The extant literature indicates that Edoid languages disallow hiatus. In phonology, disallowed patterns are often repaired when an intrinsic or extrinsic factor gives rise to them (Paradis & Lacharité, 1997). Generally, languages that do not tolerate hiatus have a constraint that prohibits such sequences of vowels (Ola, 1995; Orie & Pulleyblank, 2002). Thus, the need to satisfy the constraints is the single driving force for the application of repair operations (Murphy, 2019; Paradis & Lacharité, 1997). Studies on patterns of hiatus resolution have also shown that different languages or language groups employ different strategies (Eme & Ekiugbo, 2024). For Edoid languages, it is argued that hiatus resolution employs two processes - glide formation and vowel elision, both occurring “in exactly the same morphosyntactic context” (Casali, 2011, p. 1477), and their interaction couched as a function of an ad hoc rule application. The assumption is that when there is a co-occurrence of two vowels in these languages, one of the vowels in the sequence obligatorily deletes. However, when the first vowel across the boundary is a high vowel (/i, u/), deletion becomes impossible (see Aziza, 2006; Masagbor, 1989; Cf. Ekiugbo, 2022). Rather the front high vowel is realized as a glide. Thus, the high vowels are said to have a blocking effect on the application of vowel elision, the motivation of which is not stated or grounded in any phonetic or phonological explanation. This study therefore provides an alternative explanation of the interaction between glide formation and vowel elision in Edoid languages based on insights from the theory of constraints and repair strategies. It argues that only vowel elision is triggered as a repair operation in these languages, while glide formation is considered a context-driven rule while bleeds vowel elision given that context-sensitive processes (as opposed to repair operations) precede the application of repair.
References
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