This paper examines a variety of morphologically-driven vowel concatenation in SiSwati. The language SiSwati, a member of Nguni language, is spoken in Swaziland and in the eastern part of the Republic of South Africa. The vowel hiatus from morphologic...
This paper examines a variety of morphologically-driven vowel concatenation in SiSwati. The language SiSwati, a member of Nguni language, is spoken in Swaziland and in the eastern part of the Republic of South Africa. The vowel hiatus from morphological operation is resolved by three kinds of phonological processes: glide formation, vowel deletion, and vowel coalescence. The goal of this paper is to claim that the apparently independent phenomena are accounted for in a unified, principled way within the framework of Optimality Theory. It is shown that a single, well–motivated constraint hierarchy is responsible for the seemingly independent phonological phenomena.