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Browsing Scholarly Publication by Author "Maduagwu, G. O. & Isaiah, Adebola. A."

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    An optimality analysis of Òwórò Vowel Harmony
    (2013) Maduagwu, G. O. & Isaiah, Adebola. A.
    Oworo, spoken by some people in the North-West of Lokoja Local Government Area, Kogi State of Nigeria, is one of the Yoruboid languages yet to be systematically and comprehensively phonologically researched. This study examines the vowel harmony of Oworo using the optimality theoretical (OT) framework with a view to establishing the descriptive and explanatory adequacies of OT for Oworo data. The work shows the application of OT to Oworo data giving a new perspective to the phonological process of Oworo vowel harmony. Different from previous generative theories, OT does not derive phonetic representation from underlying representation via a set of rules. Rather, for any particular word, many forms are generated at the outset, and the job of the theory is to select from the many forms only that form that indeed occurs in the language. Using OT, a systematic, comprehensive analysis of Oworo vowel harmony is achieved, thus solving the unresolved problems of earlier theories adequately. This is because linguistic well-formedness is a matter of comparison or competition among candidate output forms. The analysis of vowel harmony presented has shown that constraints are neither imposed on inputs nor on the mapping between inputs and outputs. This study reveals that right-edge harmony can be violated in Oworo vowel harmony system. Harmony targets the rightmost "eligible" anchors and not necessarily the "rightmost" anchor absolutely. The study has been able to establish the descriptive and explanatory adequacies of OT account of vowel harmony for Oworo data, over previous generative theories.