OCP Effects: Elision and Glide Formation in Ewulu

Abstract

This paper presents some notable aspects of phonological processes occurring at the CV tier which we observe are OCP-motivated. In Ewulu a western igbo dialect spoken in Delta state , it is clearly revealed that the processes of syncope , apocope and glide formation result from the influence of the OCP, an acronym for obligatory Contour Principle at first proposed by Leben (1973) to account for the fact that in tone languages identical tones cannot be adjacent to each other. Later studies (see Mc Carthy 1986,yip 1988)have shown that, aside the OCP effects on tones, it equally constrains segmental units in such that identical segments cannot be adjacent to each other. In Ewulu, it has been observed that where adjacency of identical phonological units occurs within the word or phonological phrase, the OCP induces the processes of elision and glide formation in order to avoid violation of the OCP. We shall discuss fully these processes by adopting the non- linear framework of the autosegmental theory.