A Sonority Constraint in Hausa

Kyung-Im Han

Abstract for paper presented at
The 4th World Congress Of African Linguistics (WOCAL 4)
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
June 17 - 22, 2003

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between consonant sequences and sonority in Hausa. I will demonstrate that sonority determines the properties of sequences: the sonority of the coda of the preceding syllable has to be greater than or equal to the sonority of the onset of the following syllable. According to the sonority hierarchy, voiceless obstruents have the least sonority and vowels have the greatest sonority. For instance, in the consonant consequences, lt, mf, nk, nt, rf, rk, the sonority of the first consonant is greater than or equal to sonority of the second consonant. In addition, Newman (2000) and Jaggar (2001) claim that kw, ky, fy, etc. are treated as one phoneme. However, they do leave the sequence ry as two separate phonemes. What I am proposing here is that since ry violates the sonority constraint, it has to be treated as one phoneme like kw, ky, fy, etc. This research shows that sonority constraint explains not only why consonant sequences *bm, *sm, etc are not allowed in Hausa since these consonant sequences do not abide by the sonority constraint, but also why the sequences of a consonant plus a glide such as kw, ky, fy, etc are treated as one phoneme, and not as two.

Kyung-Im Han is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. She can be reached at Kyung.Han@Colorado.EDU.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 1 - June 2005