摘要：This study attempts to present an Optimality Theoretic (Prince and Smolensky,1993) analysis of the svara sandhi changes occurring in Odia (An Indo-Aryan language spoken in the eastern state of Odisha, India). Odia, like other major Indian languages such as Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, etc., has been influenced by Sanskrit and has hence subsumed the phenomenon of sandhi occurring in Sanskrit. The phenomena of two sounds combining to form a new sound, or the insertion of glides in certain other constructions, or how two vowels of differing heights combine to result in a sort of Vowel Harmony where instead of one vowel influencing the other, both vowels influence each other and result in a sound which has qualities of both vowels. These are some of the processes that will be looked into. This paper uses the Optimality Theoretic framework to explain these processes. Newly developed constraints such as COALESCENE, *Diphthongs, (low, back V + low, back V = /a/) are proposed in this study along with certain other common and well-established faithfulness constraints such as MAX-V and DEP-V. The study analyses the svara sandhi process in Odia which has evolved from Sanskrit and shares the same features in most constructions while simultaneously showing the applicability of Optimality Theory in such a study.
