Gradual Vowel Epenthesis in Urban Hijazi Arabic

In this paper, vowel epenthesis in Urban Hijazi Arabic is analysed as a process of gradual structural build-up. Harmonic Serialism, a derivational framework of Optimality Theory, provides the theoretical foundation to illustrate the arguments. Rather than epenthesising an entire vowel all at once, featural structure progressively increases in successive steps. This accumulation continues until the required vowel quality is achieved. Specifically, the constraint hierarchy predicts high epenthetic vowels to occur in closed syllables and the low epenthetic vowel in open syllables. The same constraint hierarchy, however, is also expected to predict both gradual epenthesis and gradual deletion. In that regard, a seemingly paradoxical situation is created when the very same intermediate vowel quality is achieved through accumulation or attrition of featural structure. This particular vowel quality, in exactly the same environment, will have to continue gaining internal structure towards epenthesis or continue losing internal structure towards deletion. Eventually, identifying the path that the derivation takes to reach a certain vowel will help to resolve the issue.

Multiple Sources of Surprisal Affect Illusory Vowel Epenthesis

Illusory epenthesis is a phenomenon in which listeners report hearing a vowel between a phonotactically illegal consonant cluster, even in the complete absence of vocalic cues. The present study uses Japanese as a test case and investigates the respective roles of three mechanisms that have been claimed to drive the choice of epenthetic vowel—phonetic minimality, phonotactic predictability, and phonological alternations—and propose that they share the same rational goal of searching for the vowel that minimally alters the original speech signal. Additionally, crucial assumptions regarding phonological knowledge held by previous studies are tested in a series of corpus analyses using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. Results show that all three mechanisms can only partially account for epenthesis patterns observed in language users, and the study concludes by discussing possible ways in which the mechanisms might be integrated.

A Contrastive Study on Noun Diminutive Formation in Tafili Spoken Arabic and Jijilian Spoken Arabic

The present study aims at contrasting the patterns governing noun diminutive formation between Tafili Spoken Arabic (TSA), a dialect in Jordanian Arabic (JA), and Jijilian Spoken Arabic (JSA), a dialect in Algerian Arabic, and then accounting for that within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). Throughout the analysis of the collected data, it is found that the diminutive forms in both dialects are based on a change in the phonological processes of a word by insertion, deletion or changing of some phonological segments. However, the present study has disclosed that noun diminutive forms in TSA result from the application of the following phonological processes: vowel epenthesis, vowel shortening, glide insertion, vowel syncope, and the insertion of the glottal stop at the beginning of words. Whereas noun diminutive forms in JSA result from the application of the following phonological processes: vowel syncope, vowel epenthesis, vowel shortening, glide insertion, degemination and metathesis. The application of OT to account for those phonological processes indicates that they happen from a continual conflict between some markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints. The researchers recommend for another study to be applied investigating and contrasting the patterns governing noun diminutive formation between other two dialects by accounting for that within the framework of OT.

Adjacent Consonants and the Universality of Sonority Sequencing Principle in Dotyali Dialects: Syllable Contact Analysis

This paper presents on all the possible adjacent consonant letters in Dotyali, one of the descendant language of Sanskrit, mainly spoken in Shudoor Paschim Nepal [sʊdʊrə-pəssɪmə] (Far-western) and compares the results of their phonological changes in seven local contemporary speech (dialects)：Doteli，Dadeldhuri，Bajhangi，Achhami，Baitadeli，Darchuli and Bajureli. Based on the corpus data from the field survey conducted in between July-September 2017 on a list of 1000 frequently used Dotyali words, this paper comes with a conclusion that even the onset clusters with rising sonority profile (except glides) are broken up by vowel epenthesis or simplify the clusters by deletion. It is revealed that dialects, except from the Achhami and Bajureli, the consonants with different degree of sonority across the syllable boundary tend to be changed due to syllable contact to meet Sonority hierchy, but the sonority distance between two consonants (coda and onset consonants) varies, therefore phonological changes like assimilation, dissimilation, desonorization, contact anaptyxis, contact methasis etc. goes differently. The phonological changes in Bajureli occurs maily due to other separate independent constraints.

Sonority Principle in French Nominal Loanwords into Moroccan Arabic: An Optimality-theoretic Analysis

This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the framework of optimality theory. The focus is to unveil the phonological and morphological repair strategies enforced by the phonotactic constraints of the borrowing language to resolve sonority principle in complex codas. The investigated phonological strategy is schwa and a high vowel epenthesis. Schwa epenthesis is triggered to split final biconsonantal codas that violate sonority principle. In three consonantal coda clusters, schwa insertion is conditioned by the sonority value of the consonants, where it is consistently epenthesized before the most sonorous segment. A high vowel behaves differently; it is epenthesized in the final position without splitting the coda cluster, and enforces the cluster to be syllabified as an onset instead of a coda, and as such sonority principle is satisfied. It is also argued that the addition of the morphological marker {-a}, which is primarily morphologically driven, indirectly satisfies sonority principle; by doing so, it blocks the application of schwa or a high vowel epenthesis, which points to the fact that such phonological and morphological strategies conspire to satisfy sonority principle. The study also provides further support for the phonological stance on loanword adaptation.

Vowel-consonant metathesis in Nivaĉle

Vowel-consonant metathesis is observed in a variety of contexts throughout the Nivaĉle (Mataguayan) grammar. It occurs in both verbal and nominal domains, characteristically resulting from the affixation of a consonant-initial suffix to a consonant-final stem. This paper provides an optimality theoretic account for vowel-consonant metathesis and vowel epenthesis in Nivaĉle. It is demonstrated that metathesis responds to phonological requirements; specifically, it serves to avoid marked structures in the language: complex codas, derived complex onsets, and bad syllable contacts. The prosodic analysis of syllable structure constraints aims to provide broad empirical coverage, as well as a coherent and integrated theoretical interpretation.

Produção dos verbos do inglês terminados em -ed por falantes de línguas maternas distintas

Production of verbs ending in -ed is among the most frequent challenges for learners of English. Literature shows that learners tend to use vowel epenthesis or -ed omission to produce these verbs. The present study investigated the production of English verbs ending in -ed by two speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, two of Spanish, two of German and two of English. Each participant individually audio-recorded 96 sentences with one verb in each of them, including 72 verbs ending in -ed and 24 irregular verbs, distractors in this study. The eight participants produced a total of 576 verbs with 25.52% of non-target productions, suggesting that these results were affected by participants’ proficiency, which seemed to be higher than the proficiency of participants from previous studies on verbs ending in -ed. Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish L1 speakers tended to use vowel epenthesis and -ed omission in verb production whereas German L1 speakers tended to use -ed omission, producing less marked syllable structures that are similar to their L1s’, following the tendency found in previous studies. Verb production was also influenced by change in the context preceding the -ed due to misreading, L1 and verb orthography. Production of verbs by English L1 speakers showed the -ed omission, which was possibly caused by blending and linking of similar sounds during the reading.

Medial Tri-Consonantal Clusters in UrbanJordanian Arabic

This study investigates syllable structure andsyllabification patterns in Urban JordanianArabic. The focus falls on the case ofmorphologically derived medial tri-consonantalclusters. Such constructions involve theconcatenation of a CVCC syllable with a -CVsuffix. We argue that morphologically-derivedmedial tri-consonantal clusters in UJA areresolved when two consonants share a single morathrough the process of adjunction-to-mora (Broselow,1992; Broselowet al. 1995, 1997). Thisargument challenges Kiparsky’s (2003) typologywhich maintains that VC-dialects, towhich the dialect of UJA belongs, deal with suchclusters by means of syllable-unaffiliated morascalled semisyllables lexically and bymeans of vowel epenthesis post-lexically.Contrary to this, we argue that CVCC syllablesare bimoraic under a mora-sharing analysis whichthen allows -CCC- clusters to surface withinCVCC.CV syllables without the need to resort tosemisyllables. Keywords: syllable structure, tri-consonantal clusters,mora-sharing, semisyllable, Urban JordanianArabic.