Post-Lexical Vowel Deletion in Obolo

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, there is a tendency for juxtaposed segments in a connected speech to undergo some phonological modifications, which sometimes result in the re-syllabification of segments, for a preferred CV structure, or even a complex structure. One phonological process that conditions re-syllabification is vowel deletion, which is determined by the constraints responsible for regulating the syllable structure of a language. This paper examines the conditioning environments for vowel deletion in the Obolo language, the direction of vowel deletion, and morpheme boundary vowel combinations that do rebuff deletion. Data for the study were elicited from eight informants in the Amadaka speech community of Eastern Obolo Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State, who were selected through the stratified sampling method. Findings show that in Obolo, vowels occur before stops and nasals in the CV.CV syllables outside a morpheme are generally deleted, while the stop in the affected syllable is always exposed to weakening. This happens after an initial CVC.V syllable is re-syllabified to CV.CV. These cases are regulated by *VstopV, NOCODA, and *CV.CV. The high vowels also determine the deletion of their non-high counterparts, implying that they cannot co-occur at morpheme boundary. When preceded by a stop consonant, the high back vowel /u/, together with any other vowel at morpheme boundary also repel deletion, while MAX-+V2hi regulates the deletion of V1 when two high vowels occur at morpheme boundary. Naturally, *CV.CV fails to apply during height-induced V-deletion, thereby necessitating the non-application ranking schema, MCONS >> IO-faith >> MCON, in the analysis. The constraints defined and used in this study show the phonotactics and language-specific ranking schema for Obolo language regarding deletion, for a preferred syllable structure.