Minimality in siSwati

Abstract

Many languages have minimal prosodic restrictions on the size of well-formed words. This study explores word minimality restrictions on the siSwati Prosodic Word, with emphasis on how the grammar of the language repairs submininal constructions. It provides evidence for word minimality in different forms of the Verb and the Noun within the siSwati grammar. It further illustrates that siSwati grammar triggers different augmentation strategies across various morphosyntactic domains. The dissertation provides a formal Optimality Theory analysis of the minimality restrictions on the PWord, highlighting how minimality effects in siSwati pattern with other Bantu in general and Nguni languages in particular. This work demonstrates that the Prosodic Hierarchy and its domains determine whether the siSwati grammar triggers or blocks augmentation to satisfy minimality constraints. The aim of this study is to present the first comprehensive account of repair strategies used in siSwati to maintain preferred phonological structures, highlighting the importance of the syllable and word as essential levels of phonological analysis in this language and others like it. Findings reveal that the language selects phonological or morphological augmentation to parse grammatical constructions that are minimally well-formed in all surface representations in the siSwati grammar. The requirements for minimality evident from this study are the same crosslinguistically, with siSwati and Xitsonga employing a suffixal morpheme as opposed to the prefixal morpheme employed by all the other Nguni languages in the imperative. In Nguni languages prefixing augmentation is unmarked while suffixing augmentation is marked. Additionally, the results of this analysis are compared to those of other Southern Bantu languages in an effort to situate siSwati within its language family, thereby contributing, in a small but significant way, to linguistic typology.