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Syllable asymmetries in comparative Yoruba phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2000

OLANIKE OLA ORIE
OLANIKE OLA ORIE
Affiliation:
Tulane University
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Abstract

Syllables display symmetrical and asymmetrical properties in two Yoruba dialects. In the asymmetrical dialect, only a vowel with an onset participates in syllable-conditioned processes; an onsetless vowel is syllabically inert. In the symmetrical dialect, a vowel, with or without an onset, participates in syllable processes. It is argued that onsetless vowels are not syllabified in the asymmetrical dialect. Since there is no phonological contrast between syllables with onsets and those without onsets in the symmetrical dialect, all vowels are parsed into syllables exhaustively. Using ideas from Optimality Theory, attested interdialectal variation is shown to follow from different rankings of the same syllable and faithfulness constraints.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2000 , pp. 39 - 84
Copyright
2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Doug Pulleyblank, Pat Shaw, Laura Downing, Akin Akinlabi, Mark Hewitt, Ping Jiang-King, Rose-Marie Déchaine, Myles Leitch and Victoria Bricker for comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the two JL anonymous referees for extensive and valuable comments which were very useful in reworking an earlier version of this paper in Correspondence Theory. Earlier versions have been presented in talks given at the University of British Columbia and the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on African Linguistics held at UCLA in March 1995. This research was supported in part by SSHRCC grant 410-94–0035 awarded to Douglas Pulleyblank and a faculty research grant funded by Tulane University.