Abstract
This thesis aims at clarifying the phonological status and related issues of the two guttural consonants, epiglottal stops and glottal stops, and the two glides [w] and [j] of Nataoran Amis, which belongs to Northern dialect. To provide an overall picture, general phonology including diachronic data is provided in the first place. The presented consonant inventory foreshows the phonemic status of glottal stop, epiglottal stop and the two glides. Epiglottal stop is considered as a phoneme which is the regular reflex of Proto-Austronesian (PAn) phoneme *q. Glottal stops, on the other hand, are shown to be environmentally conditioned. [ʔ] are epenthetic segments that presents as the repair strategy for resolving vowel sequences, vowel-initial and vowel-final words. In addition, the counterbleeding opacity between the processes of [ʔ]-epenthesis and optionally /ə/-deletion is observed and further analyzed in the framework of Optimality Theory with Candidate Chains (OT-CC, McCarthy 2007). As for the two glides, the occurrence of [j] and [w] are also proved to be phonologically conditioned, through either glide formation or glide epenthesis. Apart from the phonemic status of the four dubious sounds, vowel sequence resolution strategies are also captured throughout the thesis and analyzed under the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1993b, Prince and Smolensky 1993). Three competitive repair strategies, [ʔ]-epenthesis, glide formation and glide epenthesis, resolve the problem of underlying vowel sequences. It shall be noted that the repair strategy employed for vowel sequences spanning across prefix-root boundaries is different from the one applied across suffix-root boundaries and root-internal position, even if the phonological environments are exactly the same.