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Aspect Of The Phonology Of Yukuben
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1.4 GENETIC CLASSIFICATION OF YUKUBEN
AFRICA
AFRO-ASIATIC NILO-SAHARA NIGER-KORDOFANIAN KHOISAN
NIGER- CONGO KORDOFANIAN
WEST-ATLANTIC MANDE GUR KWA BENUE-CONGO ADAMAWA HANGIAN
PLATEAU JUKUNOID CROSS- RIVER BANTOID
YUKUBEN
SOURCE: WILLIAMSON (1982)
1.5 SCOPE AND ORGANISATION OF STUDY
This work comprises five chapters in all. Chapter one covers the
general background and introduction of the study, quits to historical
background, and their socio-cultural profile like, occupation, religion,
population, tradition, culture and festivals etc. The chapter also
contains the languages genetic classification, theoretical framework,
data collection and analysis.
Chapter two focuses on the
basic phonological concepts like sounds inventory, which comprises
consonants and vowels together with tonal and syllable inventory, sound
distribution and distinctive features.
Chapter three
centres on the phonological processes that are attested in the language.
It explains such processes as in the language like labialization,
nasalization, homorganic assimilation, vowel harmony etc.
Chapter four deals with the tonal/syllable processes as attested in the
language while chapter five covers the summary and conclusion of the
study.
1.6 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK – GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY
Generative phonology, as in Chomsky and Halle (1968), will be used in
this study of Yukuben phonology. The basic goal of generative phonology
is to express the link between sound and meaning (Chomsky 1965). It
gives the rule of how the mind perceives sounds and how those sounds are
produced with the interpretation of utterances. Generative phonology
accounts for linguistic intuition, accent, speech error and language
acquisition among others.
Generative phonology is one of
the most recently used optimality theory. In 1959, Chomsky and Halle
worked on generative phonology with knowledge of the sequential
constraints, which are responsible for the fact of speakers in language
to have a sense of sounds like in their native language. Generative
phonology is the description on how phonological rules can be converted
into phonological representation and the capturing of the distinctive
sounds in contrast in a language (Hyman 1975:19).
Generative phonology focuses on grammar as consisting a set of finite
rules operating upon a finite vocabulary, and capable of generating an
infinite set of sentences. According to Lyons (1970), the rules and
structures generated through generative phonology are like syntax,
“recursiveâ€. For instance, one could say;
‘This is the man that married the girl that wrote the book that was stolen by my friend that lives in London’.
One
could therefore say that a generative syntax or phonology explains the
grammar that is capable of generating an infinite number of recursive
rules of operating upon a finite vocabulary.
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