UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2015) Single URs vs. allomorphy: The case of Babanki coda consonant deletion Pius W. Akumbu University of Buea, Cameroon 1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to account for a number of phonological alternations that occur on nouns, verbs, deverbal adjectives, and pronouns at the postlexical level in Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. 2 The alternation involves the deletion of certain coda consonants between two underlying vowels. This can be illustrated by the deletion of /ŋ/ which is accompanied by the raising of /a/ and /o/ to [o] and [u] respectively (Mutaka & Phubon 2006): 3 (1) əsaŋ ‘corn’ əsɔŋ ‘tooth’ akwəŋ ‘arms’ əsō: ghɔmə ‘my corn’ əsū: ghɔmə ‘my tooth’ akwə: ghɔmə ‘my arms’ /əsaŋ ə ghomə/ /əsoŋ ə ghomə/ /əkwəŋ a ghomə/ These changes fail to occur if /ŋ/ is not followed by a vowel in the underlying representation (UR), as illustrated in the second example in (2). (2) əkaŋ kəkaŋ ‘dishes’ ‘dish’ əko: wiʔ ‘a person’s dishes’ kəkaŋ kə wiʔ ‘a person’s dish’ /əkaŋ ə wiʔ/ /kəkaŋ kə wiʔ/ There are two possible ways to account for these changes, namely, a rule- or constraint- based phonological analysis which starts with an input from which an output is derived, and a precompiled phonology approach in which allomorphs are listed with appropriate frames where they are inserted (Hayes 1990). In the first approach, proposed underlying segmental forms are exactly as they would occur in isolation, for This paper was written during my stay at the University of California, Berkeley as a Fulbright research scholar (Sept. 1, 2015 - May 31, 2016) and I would like to sincerely thank Larry Hyman for his invaluable input at all stages of the life of this paper. Although native speakers of the language prefer to use Kejom when referring both to the language and the two villages where it is spoken, I have chosen Babanki, the administrative name by which the language and the people are widely known. The rest of the data in this paper are drawn from a lexical database of 2000 entries in Filemaker Pro™.