The Phonology of Olutura Syllables

Abstract

This thesis is about the sound segments, syllable structures and phonological processes of Olutura with the main aim of making a contribution towards making a valid conclusion as to which group of Luyia dialects Olutura belongs to. Olutura is one of the dialects of the Luyia continuum of dialects spoken in Western Kenya, E. Africa. The objective of the study was to find out how the phonological processes of Olutura constraint the formation of its syllable structures. The study first identifies the sound segments and how they function in this dialect before looking at the composition of the optimal syllable and the phonological processes that affect its construction. The study used Generative CV Phonology and OT sub-theories of the Correspondence and Syllable Theory in its investigation. The former is used to identify the syllable types by displaying the sound segments that constitute the different syllable types of Olutura. The OT notion of constraint ranking is used to establish why Olutura makes the choices that it does in its formation of syllables. A purposive sampling technique was used to identify native Olutura speakers and to categorize the data into the required categories for analysis. The results of this study show that Olutura has a 5V system. Olutura has 23 consonants that have a primary place of articulation and 20 with secondary articulation. This dialect has a total of seven syllable structures; V, CV, CVV, CCV, CGV, GGV and VV. The results also show that the phonological processes of coalescence, prothesis, epenthesis, and gliding complement each other in HR so as to arrive at the structural requirements of Olutura. With regard to coalescence, Olutura has two types of coalescence; one is identity coalescence which has two sub-types in which two different vowels merge into one intermediate vowel and the other subtype is whereby two vowels in the underlying representation (UR) are replaced by either of them in the surface representation (SR).The second type is identity coalescence in which the SR maintains the features of the vowel in the UR. In the phonological process of elision, the elision of both V1 and V2 occurs in Olutura and the vowel that elides can be from either the lexical or function word. Another observation is that labialization serves four functions in Olutura; it distinguishes meaning, it helps in the process of syllabification by determining the number of syllables in a word, it is used as a strategy for HR and it also serves the grammatical function of changing words from one class to another. The observation regarding the processes of SA and prenasalization is that in Olutura, SA occurs through the three processes of prothesis, epenthesis and voicing and prenalized segments are only formed by having a nasal followed by a voiced bilabial, alveolar or velar plosive, respectively. This study concludes that while Olutura uses the phonological processes of coalescence, elision, epenthesis, prothesis and glide formation are used to resolve hiatus in Olutura, the dialect does not completely disallow hiatus in its phonotactics.