Developing an Embosi (Bantu C25) Speech Variant Dictionary to Model Vowel Elision and Morpheme Deletion
Résumé
This paper investigates vowel elision and morpheme deletion in
Embosi (Bantu C25), an under-resourced language spoken in
the Republic of Congo. We propose that the observed mor-
pheme deletion is morphological, and that vowel elision is
phonological. The study focuses on vowel elision that occurs
across word boundaries between the contact of long/short vow-
els (i.e. CV[long] # V[short].CV), and between the contact of
short/short vowels (CV[short] # V[short].CV). Several differ-
ent categories of morphemes are explored: (i) prepositions (ya,
mo), (ii) class-noun nominal prefixes (ba, etc.), (iii) singular
subject pronouns (ngá, nO, wa). For example, the preposition,
ya, regularly deletes allowing for vowel elision if vowel contact
occurs between the head of the noun phrase and the previous
word. Phonetically motivated speech variants are proposed in
the lexicon used for forced alignment (segmentation) enabling
these phenomena to be quantified in the corpus so as to develop
a dictionary containing relevant phonetic variants.