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Phonotactic c(l)ues to Bantu noun class disambiguation

  • Aaron Braver and Wm. G. Bennett EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 13, 2016
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 2 Issue 1

Abstract

While a number of phonologists assume that phonotactics can provide clues to abstract morphological information, this possibility has largely gone unconsidered in work on Bantu noun classes. We present experimental evidence from isiXhosa (a Bantu language of the Nguni family, from South Africa), showing that speakers make use of root phonotactics when assigning noun classes to nonce words. Nouns in Xhosa bear class-indicating prefixes, but some of these prefixes are homophonous – and therefore ambiguous. Our findings show that when speakers are presented with words that have prefixes ambiguous between two classes, phonotactic factors can condition them to treat the nouns as one class or the other. This suggests that noun class (and other abstract morphological information) is not only stored in the lexicon, but is also redundantly indicated by phonotactic clues.

Keywords: phonotactics; noun class; NC; Xhosa; isiXhosa; Bantu

Funding statement: Funding: This work was supported by a grant from the Rhodes University Research Council.

Acknowledgments

We owe thanks first and foremost to all of our experiment participants. We also thank Msindisi Sam and Danica Kreusch for invaluable assistance in preparing and conducting the experiment. For assistance collecting the data, we thank Kelly Goldstuck, and Olona Tywabi. For helpful feedback and discussion, we thank Jochen Zeller, Seunghun Lee, Maxwell Kadenge, Lionel Posthumus, Stephan Schulz, Mark de Vos, Blake Allen, Claire Moore-Cantwell, and Hannah Sande. Authors’ names are in reverse alphabetical order.

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Published Online: 2016-12-13
Published in Print: 2016-12-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0062
Keywords for this article
phonotactics; noun class; NC; Xhosa; isiXhosa; Bantu

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial
  2. Editorial
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Phonotactic c(l)ues to Bantu noun class disambiguation
  5. Articulatory correlates of metrical structure: Studying jaw displacement patterns
  6. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  7. Statistics and semantics in the acquisition of Spanish word order: Testing two accounts of the retreat from locative overgeneralization errors
  8. Historical Linguistics
  9. Tangut, Gyalrongic, Kiranti and the nature of person indexation in Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan
  10. Usage-based perspectives on diachronic morphology: A mixed-methods approach towards English ing-nominals
  11. Morphology & Syntax
  12. What we talk about when we talk about biolinguistics
  13. Structure vs. use in heritage language
  14. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  15. An evaluation of noise on LPC-based vowel formant estimates: Implications for sociolinguistic data collection
  16. Cognitive Linguistics
  17. Fluid construction grammar as a biological system
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