G. N. Clements, Sylvester Osu
Nasal harmony in Ikwere, a language with no phonemic nasal consonants
This paper presents a descriptive study of nasals and
nasal harmony in Ikwere, an Igboid language of Nigeria. In the variety studied
here, nasality is surface-contrastive in vowels but not in consonants. Nasality
has the status of a morpheme-level feature which is either present or absent in
each morpheme (root or affix). If present, it is predictably distributed across
nonobstruent sounds by a system of nasal harmony which operates within the
domain of the simple word, spreading nasality bidirectionally until blocked by
an obstruent. The class of nasalizing sounds includes the nonexplosive stops
? and
’? ,
confirming results of an earlier study showing these sounds to be nonobstruents
(Clements and Osu 2002). The analysis brings to light some of the basic
typological parameters that characterize nasal harmony in Ikwere, as well as an
idiosyncratic restriction to the “phonological root”, a domain which excludes
initial syllables in noun roots that are homophonous with prefixes in other
words. The paper concludes with a summary and discussion of implications for the
feature analysis and typology of stops.
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0167-6164
Volume: 26, 12/2005
Pages: 165 - 200
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