| Abstract: | This paper discusses typological considerations for vowel hiatus resolution and in particular the phenomenon of asymetric hiatus resolution. Earlier analyses of asymmetric hiatus resolution posited that asymmetric coalescence arises when both feature-sensitive and position-sensitive constraints are active in the evaluation of output candidates; that is, the feature specification [-high] must be preserved in preference to [+high], otherwise all features of the stem vowel are to be preserved (Casali 1996). By analyzing data from Ciyao (Ngunga 2000), I show that there exists a second type of language exhibiting asymmetric hiatus resolution that is not sensitive to stem/affix distinctions. I propose that height coalescence in this language is a result of segmental fusion, where two segments in the input correspond to a single output segment (Kager 1999; Pater 2004), and a ranking of Ident(-F) over Ident(+F), where F refers to the vowel articulatory features [high] and [low]. |
