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Vowel harmony in Palestinian Arabic: a metrical perspective1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Issam M. Abu-Salim
Affiliation:
Department of English, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

Extract

Previous work on vowel harmony (VH) in Palestinian Arabic (PA), particularly Kenstowicz (1981), has shown that this process is more adequately expressed in autosegmental than in linear terms, since the former permits the two otherwise uncollapsible regressive and progressive harmony processes to be stated in a single unified rule. The present study complements that autosegmental analysis. It shows that the autosegmental rule of VH in PA is constrained simultaneously by metrical and segmental boundaries. That is, high front vowels acquire the feature [+round] only if they are dominated by a foot marked [+round] and if they occur within the segmental domain of VH which comprises the stem and the preceding prefixes.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

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