HIATAL CONFIGURATIONS AND THEIR RESOLUTION IN KINSHASA LINGALA: EVIDENCE FROM SONGS BY TPOK JAZZ BAND

Abstract

This paper is a constraint-based description of hiatal configurations in Kinshasa Lingala and the strategies used to resolve them in connected speech. The study is grounded in Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004) from which the notion of constraint ranking was used to analyse the phonological processes elicited to resolve hiatal configurations. The data were obtained from the lyrics of 15 songs composed and performed by the TPOK Jazz Band. The findings show that hiatal configurations occur in the underlying forms of words, phrases and clauses and since they are marked in connected speech, the dialect employs the processes of glide formation, vowel deletion, glide epenthesis and vowel coalescence to resolve them. Each of these processes results from the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints in which the anti-hiatus markedness constraint *HIATUS dominates all faithfulness constraints to ensure that the optimal outputs of the processes do not bear hiatal configurations. As such, the output in each process must satisfy a hierarchy of the relevant constraints by satisfying the greatest number of the high-ranking constraints. The paper concludes that hiatus resolution is chiefly motivated by the need to preserve the basic syllable structures of the dialect. The paper contributes to scholarship on the nexus between music and language.