HIATUS RESOLUTION IN GA: AN OPTIMALITY THEORY ACCOUNT

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the hiatus resolution in Ga, a Kwa language of the Niger-Congo Family spoken in Ghana. It looks at the strategies that are used in resolving hiatus and the contexts where hiatus is permitted. All languages in the world try to resolve this situation by using several strategies to break that cluster and Ga is no exception to that. Most often than not, when hiatus is resolved it has an impact on the syllable. Some of the repair strategies that have been reported in previous studies are vowel elision, assimilation, glide formation, vowel coalescence, diphthong formation (diphthongisation), and consonant epenthesis (Casali 2011 cited in Vratsanos and Kadanga 2017). In this research, four strategies were studied in resolving hiatus in the Ga language. The analysis is anchored on a theory called Optimality Theory (hereafter OT). The strategies operate within stem as well as across word boundary. Deletion is the first strategy the language employs and when blocked by phonotactic constraints, Coalescence becomes the next strategy to use. After which assimilation also becomes the next strategy after the aforementioned two strategies are exhausted or blocked. Finally, the language also employs Insertion as another strategy used in resolving hiatus. Though this strategy exists, it is very rare in the language. Only few examples were observed during the data collection. Though the language uses the aforementioned strategies in resolving hiatus, there are instances where the vowel sequence remained unchanged. Nevertheless, it is possible in the language to have two or more sequence of vowels occurring in the same environment. That notwithstanding, it must share the same vowel-like features. Even with that, in some contexts they are resolved using one of the several mechanisms aforementioned.