A Preliminary Description of Phonological Underspecification in Igala

Certain segments and tones in Igala are better viewed as phonologically underspecified for an appropriate account of the surface phonetic specification. This paper establishes the phenomenon of phonological underspecification in Igala consonants, vowels and tones by describing samples in the CV-structured partial reduplicative morpheme of a degree modifying adverb in the language for underspecified consonant, instances of underspecified vowels in the non-number non-person subject clitic, the auxiliary clitic, the interrogative clitic, the complementizer/relativizer clitic and the complementary binominal marker, as well as tonal underspecification in pronominal subject clitics. The primary method of data collection for this paper was investigator-based introspective judgment based on the intuitive knowledge of the researcher as a native speaker of the Dekina variety of Igala. The data presented for analysis use morpheme-by morpheme mapping of object language to metalanguage structures followed by a translation, in keeping with the Leipzig Convention for interlinear glossing (Available: http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resource/glossing-rules.php). Representation of the object language utilizes phonetic valued symbols based on International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).