AN AUTOSEGMENTAL ANALYSIS OF NASALIZATION, THE CASE OF AGBARHO

ABSTRACT
This work is concerned with nasalization in Agbarho dialect of Urhobo using the auto-segmental approach. It consists of five chapters. The introductory chapter outlines the general background to the study where the concept of Nasalization is explained. A review of the Urhobo language as well as its speakers is provided also stating the current population of the language to be over half a million, aims of study, statement of problem, review of relevant literature in Urhobo and other languages which include Ika, Yoruba and Itsekiri, where elided nasalized vowel are re-linked in Itsekiri in all cases, in Onko dialect of Yoruba; it is re-linked in some cases and totally lost in other cases. The methodology of this work is basically primary source of data collection making use of instruments like the Ibadan 400 basic word list as well as pencil and phone recorder, it was a direct participation method because the researcher was involved and the recorder was not kept out of the knowledge of the informants.
Chapter two is a review of a part of the sound system of the language under study establishing its functional sounds with the aid of minimal pairs.
Urhobo has seven oral and seven nasal vowels as well as 28 phonemic consonants with about 54 phonetic variants. Here, we also presented the phonetic and phonemic chart.
Chapter three talks on the theoretical framework. The Auto-segmental phonology framework is used for this work. It was introduced by John Goldsmith in 1976 in a bit to account for supra-segments like tone and nasalization among other supra-segmental features.
Chapter four deals with presentation and analysis of data. Progressive nasalization process was presented as it is the only kind of assimilation present in the dialect. Thereafter an auto-segmental analysis of lexical formatives as well as post lexical construction was also presented to show the re-linking of elided or disyllabified segments
Finally, chapter five contains the summary, findings and the conclusion. The various findings from this work include; there are consonant and vowel nasals in the dialect but only consonants sounds have the ability to spread nasality. I also observed that all seven oral vowels of the dialect are susceptible to be nasalized in lexical formatives. I also observed that when there is a glide or vowel elision of a nasalized vowel, the nasal feature must be re-linked with the next nasal bearing element. Nasalization in Agbarho is progressive in nature i.e the assimilating sound must come before the assimilated sound, and finally I found out that nasalization cannot be discussed without tone fusion. Therefore, I recommended for any researcher that chooses to work on this topic in any language to work on nasalization and tone as the two cannot be separated.