世新大學圖書館

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-02, Section: A, page: 0472.

Chair: STUART DAVIS.

Thesis (PH.D.)--INDIANA UNIVERSITY, 1997.

This dissertation demonstrates the various ways of satisfying minimal word requirements in language and investigates the pervasiveness of bisyllabic minimal word effects in Swahili.

The theoretical base for this dissertation is founded on the premise that many languages have minimal prosodic restrictions on the size of well-formed words. By developing Bloomfield's observation, McCarthy and Prince claim that the minimal size is counted by the number of moras or syllables, and many languages place a two-mora or two-syllable bound on the minimum size of major-category words.

The dissertation first shows various patterns for satisfying minimal word requirements in the world's languages. Two common ways of keeping words minimally bisyllabic or bimoraic--rule blocking and augmentation--are illustrated. Minimal word effects in truncated words, reduplicative templates, and in Bantu verb stems are further demonstrated.

The dissertation then focuses on bisyllabic minimal word effects in Swahili. Various patterns in word formation of nouns and abbreviated forms, all the so-called exceptional behavior of monosyllabic stems in verbal construction and reduplication, and historically frozen forms and certain irregular diachronic developments in various morpho-phonological processes are consistently accounted for as instances of bisyllabic minimal word effects. In addition, possible problems concerning strict minimal word effects in Swahili, such as dialectal differences, are also discussed.

The claim that the Swahili minimal word is bisyllabic, not bimoraic, is supported by evidence from the findings in Swahili syllable constituent issues. Findings include that long vowels are heterosyllabic, traditionally-assumed syllabic nasals are syllabic, homorganic prenasals with poly-syllabic stems are neither syllabic nor moraic, and consonants in the non-onset position behave as syllabic. Evidence bearing on the interpretation of these is cited mainly from the application of issues in nonlinear phonology, such as geminate inalterability, compensatory lengthening, postnasal hardening, and stress assignment, as well as evidence from language games and rhyming poetry.

Finally, the minimal word effect and its interaction with other phonological and morphological phenomena in Swahili are briefly considered from the perspective of optimality theory, where the characteristic behavior of the underlying monosyllabic forms is viewed as regular, resulting from a high-ranking minimal word constraint.

School code: 0093.