Syncope and Epenthesis in Levantine Arabic: A Nonlinear Approach

The nonconcatenative morphology of Arabic played a prominent role in the development of CV phonology. McCarthy (1979, 1981) showed that many Arabic word formation rules can be conceived of as stipulating a CV template to which the segmental phonemes are autosegmentally mapped. In addition, he showed that the Semitic root pattern system can be reduced to the assumption that radical consonants and vowels are on separate tiers representing different morphemes. The development of underspecification theory (Archangeli 1984) made it possible for the radical consonants and the vowels to be minimally specified in the lexicon, and for the phonological rules to apply and refer to tiers rather than the whole representations. In this study, we argue that the above assumptions are essential: First, to explain an otherwise problematic set of alternations found in some Modern Levantine Arabic dialects; and second, to provide an explanation for the effects of emphatic consonants on other neighboring segments in various Arabic dialects.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Alghazo, Mohammad Hamdan

• Language, Linguistics

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8721572

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/69835