Floating Nasality in Ìdomà-Òtùkpó- An OT Account
Abstract
The thrust of this research paper is to show that the Ìdomà language manifests nasality as a floating feature. The analysis reveals that nasality conveys independent meaning in the language. The data were purely structured using English language since that is the only medium through which the researchers could elicit data from the language consultants. Five language assistants who are native speakers of the language and have lived in the area for more than 25 years were consulted for data elicitation. Over 100 syntactic patterns basically of structures that reflect positive and corresponding negative sentences were used. The theoretical framework adopted is Optimality Theory (OT) approach. The tenets of Autosegmental theory were also adopted albeit, in passing. This is so because Autosegmental theory is the theory that caters for floating elements like nasality with which we are concerned in this paper. The findings show that nasality is a negation marker (Neg. M.) domiciled at the clause final position for sentence negation in the language and is therefore treated as a nasal morpheme in this study.
