Hiatus Resolution in Xitsonga

Abstract

Vowel hiatus is dispreferred in many languages of the world. Xitsonga, an understudied crossborder Southern Bantu language spoken in South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, employs a set of four hiatus resolution strategies: glide formation, secondary articulation, elision, and coalescence. Glide formation is the primary repair strategy, as it shows a least violation of faithfulness. In glide formation, /i/ and /u/ correspond to [j] and [w], respectively. It is blocked when V1 is preceded by a consonant, as this would incur a fatal violation of *COMPLEX. When glide formation is blocked, secondary articulation is the next preferred option. One of the interesting features of Xitsonga is that it allows secondary articulation involving mid-vowels /o e/. The Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) is often the trigger for elision, the least preferred strategy. Vowel coalescence can take two forms in Xitsonga, namely /a + i/ → [e] and /a + u/ → [o], both of which incur a non-fatal violation of UNIFORMITY. When coalescence is blocked due to an impermissible sequence of /a/ and another vowel (excluding /i/ and /u/), the /a/ is elided. We argue that a single constraint hierarchy is responsible for these seemingly disjointed repair strategies. The overall significance of this paper lies in the fact that it is the first consolidated description and formal analysis of vowel hiatus resolution in Xitsonga.

Labiovelars and the labial-velar hypothesis: Phonological Headedness in Bare Element Geometry

“…Liu 2019; Liu & Kula 2020).15 The closest common counterexample would be /pf/ which phonetically may appear to be bilabial, labio-dental, but the phonological feature for both is[Labial]. There are some isolated cases of affricates reported with branching place such as[pʂ, bʐ] in Xitsonga(Vratsanos & Kadenge 2017) and a number of other languages but their phonological status is unclear.…”