This article falls under the broad area of child language acquisition and it aims to present an analysis of the acquisition of Shona noun class prefixes. The data collection procedures involved fortnightly observation and audio-recording of the spontaneous speech of three children who were acquiring Shona as a mother tongue. The results of this investigation confirm findings from earlier studies and show that noun class prefixes are acquired in three partially overlapping stages. In the first stage, nouns are produced without class prefixes and as time progresses, in the second stage, they are produced with them but in the form of an onsetless vowel. In the third stage, nouns are produced with full and phonologically appropriate class prefixes. The empirical and theoretical findings of this investigation are expected to broaden and deepen our knowledge of morphology and the phonology-morphology interface in the context of child language acquisition. As there are few descriptive and theoretical studies on the acquisition of Shona, this research recommends more studies on this subject.
The study investigates hiatus contexts and hiatus resolution strategies in Zimbabwean Tonga. Data for this research were collected through intuition because one of the researchers is a native speaker of Tonga. The data were verified by other native speakers of Tonga. The analysis is couched within generative CV Phonology model (Clements & Keyser, 1983). The study establishes that Tonga does not allow vowel hiatus and when it occurs it is resolved by vowel deletion, secondary articulation, glide formation, glide epenthesis and vowel coalescence.These strategies do not operate haphazardly but they are motivated by different morphosyntactic and phonological environments. The study also found out that compensatory lengthening accompanies each strategy in well-defined morphosyntactic and phonological contexts. Morphosyntactically, it accompanies other hiatus resolution strategies in the verbal domain and infinitive verbs. Phonologically, compensatory lengthening accompanies other strategies when V1 is either /u/ or/i/. The major contribution of this research is typological because it adds to the Bantu literature as to how Tonga language resolves hiatus. Tonga is unique in the sense that it uses accompanying compensatory lengthening. Compensatory lengthening in Tonga occurs only in the verbal domain when V1 is either /u/or/i/.
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