The Gawwada are a small ethnic group in Ethiopia who inhabit the Omo region westrnof Lake Chamo River and North East of the Konso, and speak a language of thernCushitic family known as Gawwada.rnThis thesis deals with the syllable structure of Gawwada in light of the Moraic modelrnand discusses the sound pattern, basic syllable types, syllable constituents,rnphonotactic constraints and syllabification as well as syllable-based morphophonemicrnprocesses.rnUnlike the prevIOus studies made by Harageweyn (2002) and Geberew (2003),rnGawwada has thirty consonant and five vowel phonemes. Among the thirty consonantrnphonemes, five of them, fbi, xl, hi, lal, and Iv, are newly identified in this study. Thernlanguage has also eight basic syllable types: V, W , VC, CV, CVV, CVC, WC, andrnCWC. In addition, it has a syllable template of optional onset and coda, andrnobligatory nucleus. Besides, closed versus open, light versus weight, syllable typesrnand mono, bi and multi-syllable have been identified. The study also pointed out thatrnin Gawwada, word initial and final positions do not allow cluster of consonants.rnConsequently, the inexistence of word initial clusters has made them to be out ofrnmoraic considerations because of tbe claim that syllable onsets do not contribute tornsyllable weight as they are assumed to have no moraic value. Contrary to this, wordrnfinal clusters do contribute to syllable weight bearing a mora. During the analysis,rnsequences of three consonant clusters (tri-consonants) have been re-syllabified so asrnto make them permissible sequences by reducing them to sequences of two clusters atrnword medial positions.rnFinally, the moraic model, apart from its basic aim, which is solving syllable relatedrnissues such as vowel and consonant length, and light and heavy segments, ha alsornshown its strength by treating and explaining the morphophonemic changes such asassimilation, deletion and reduplication in light of the phonotactics of the language