Developing an Embosi (Bantu C25) Speech Variant Dictionary to Model Vowel Elision and Morpheme Deletion

International audience This paper investigates vowel elision and morpheme deletion inEmbosi (Bantu C25), an under-resourced language spoken inthe Republic of Congo. We propose that the observed mor-pheme deletion is morphological, and that vowel elision isphonological. The study focuses on vowel elision that occursacross word boundaries between the contact of long/short vow-els (i.e. CV[long] # V[short].CV), and between the contact ofshort/short vowels (CV[short] # V[short].CV). Several differ-ent categories of morphemes are explored: (i) prepositions (ya,mo), (ii) class-noun nominal prefixes (ba, etc.), (iii) singularsubject pronouns (ngá, nO, wa). For example, the preposition,ya, regularly deletes allowing for vowel elision if vowel contactoccurs between the head of the noun phrase and the previousword. Phonetically motivated speech variants are proposed inthe lexicon used for forced alignment (segmentation) enablingthese phenomena to be quantified in the corpus so as to developa dictionary containing relevant phonetic variants.