Agreement, dependencies, and Surface Correspondence in Obolo and beyond
Obolo, a lower cross-river language spoken in the Niger Delta, exhibits an implicational dependency between the onset and coda of a syllable: if a syllable has a nasal onset, then it cannot also have an oral coda (Faraclas 1984, Rowland-Oke 2003). Vowel nasalisation facts reveal this to be a long...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | Afrikaans |
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Stellenbosch University
2014-12-01
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| Series: | Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus |
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| Online Access: | https://spilplus.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/638 |
| Summary: | Obolo, a lower cross-river language spoken in the Niger Delta, exhibits an implicational
dependency between the onset and coda of a syllable: if a syllable has a nasal onset, then it
cannot also have an oral coda (Faraclas 1984, Rowland-Oke 2003). Vowel nasalisation facts
reveal this to be a long-distance, consonant-to-consonant interaction. Vowels are predictably
nasalised before a nasal consonant, but not after one, so the ban on disharmonic NVT syllables
cannot be attributed to incremental local spreading of nasality to attain a long-distance result.
The analysis proposed here explains the Obolo facts using the theory of Surface
Correspondence (Rose and Walker 2004, Hansson 2010a, Bennett 2013) as similarity-driven
agreement. Limits on this agreement prevent it from applying in certain conditions, which cause
it to present as a one-way dependency rather than full bidirectional agreement. These limitations
fall out from pre-existing concepts in the harmony literature, namely position control and value
dominance. The combination of these two effects in the same harmony system can serve to
derive certain implicational dependencies from the same mechanism as agreement. This
approach seems quite generalisable, as this paper demonstrates by applying it to a long-distance
voicing dependency in Afrikaans (Coetzee 2014), in which root-medial voiced obstruents may
not occur when this would produce disagreement with a voiceless root-initial obstruent. |
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| ISSN: | 1726-541X 2224-3380 |