User talk:Philip Ekiugbo

Abstract (Ekiugbo, P. O. 2016. The sound system of Uvwie. M. A. Thesis, University of Benin.) An examination of the literature on the sound system of Uvwiẹ shows absence of a full description of its sound system, conflicting representations of the sound inventory of the language and arguments which are better held as tentative. This study therefore seeks to bridge these gaps. It examines the sound system of the language in order to present a more detailed and accurate fact about the sound system of the language. Specifically, the study seeks to investigate the phonetic sounds of the language drawing upon evidence from instrumentation, examine the phonetic behaviour of the sounds, identify the functional status of the sounds, examine the phonological grammar and verify claims from previous studies. The corpus of data for the study comprises 688 lexical items and 41 sentences drawn from both primary and secondary sources. Primary data consist of 638 and 27 Uvwiẹ lexical items and sentences respectively elicited from two adult native speakers of the language using a 700-item word list and a recording device as instruments. Secondary data were drawn from previous works on the language. The study employed two theoretical frameworks because the work is two-pronged. The phonetic investigation of the sound system is based on the acoustic theory of speech production, while the phonological analysis is based on classical phonemics. The former theory describes speech sounds as acoustic signal. The instrument used in this study is the Praat 6.0.16 software on a notebook running windows 10. The study finds amongst other things that the phonetic inventories of Uvwiẹ consist of twenty-eight vowels, four pitch targets and forty-three consonantal phones. The phonetic vowels vary in nasal feature and in three phonetic lengths which have direct predictable relationship with tone and context. The phonemic inventory consists of fourteen vowel phonemes, twenty-seven consonantal phonemes and two level tones which are lexically and grammatically functional in the language. The study also finds that the syllable requirement of the language determines sound sequencing and the phonological processes attested in the language. Philip Ekiugbo (talk) 08:52, 31 January 2017 (UTC)