A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF DELETION PROCESSES IN ÌYÀYÚ DIALECT OF EDOID LANGUAGE IN ONDO STATE

Abstract

This study investigated deletion, a phonological process, in Ìyàyú dialect of Edoid Language. There are six quarters in Ìdó-Àní. Ìyàyú is one of the six quarters. Ìdó-Àní town is one of the towns in Ọ̀sẹ́ Local government area of Ondo State. It is a distinct quarter whose dialect is not mutually intelligible with other five quarters and has little or no affinity with Yorùbá Language.  The study described the operations of phonological processes in focus in the dialect.  Generative Theory which was propounded by Chomsky was used to account for the segmental features. The population of the study was made up of adults whose ages are between 60 years and 80 years and have lived in the quarter for about 50 years. Five language helpers (sample) made up of two men and three women, were purposefully selected for data collection. The language helpers supplied data based on the instrument constructed by the researchers to elicit responses for the study. The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) wordlist was adapted as a guide to generate the word items with consideration for local contents of the culture and environment of the study area.  The respondents were asked to pronounce the words in their regional linguistic repertoire; which were recorded with Techno 10D ipad which enabled the researchers to replay the data several times in order to get the correct pronunciations of the word items.  The data collected were presented and analysed.  The study revealed that vowel deletion manifest in three different constructions across morpheme boundary in Ìyàyú dialect.  They are noun + noun, verb + object noun and preposition + noun constructions.   The study also showed that consonant deletion is not robust and that there were few exceptions in verb + object noun construction where vowels are retained and there is no deletion.  We also found that in most of the elided vowels that occur in the dialect, V₁ is the candidate of deletion and such vowels are deleted with their tones in all the three constructions.