VOWEL SHORTENING AND LENGTHENING RULES IN HAUSA

This paper concerns itself with vowel shortening and lengthening rules in Hausa. It applies the theory’ of generative phonology> in an attempt to find out instances whereby short and long vowels are shortened and lengthened respectively as a result of some linguistic rules. The paper found out that, short and long vowel undergo shortening and lengthening when morphophonological and morphosyntactic rules are applied especially in reduplication, compounding as well as in grade system. Some of the data used in the paper were selected from previous works done on reduplication, compounding and grade system. The idea behind choosing generative phonology’ as a framework, is to illustrate clearly how shortening and lengthening are done from underlying representation to surface form.