A Phonetic Study of Vowel Epenthesis in the Dialect of Misurata: Preliminary Results

Tareq Maiteq

المؤلفون

Tareq Maiteq College for Industrial Technology, Misurata, Libya

الملخص

A pilot phonetic study on vowel epenthesis in the dialect of Misurata was conducted. The aim of the experiment was to gain insight into the identity and behavior of the epenthetic vowel. The acoustic profile showed that the epenthetic vowel is /i/. It was also found that the epenthetic vowel occurs within CC coda clusters. In addition, the duration of the epenthetic vowel is determined by its prosodic position. For example, in single word lists the epenthetic vowel is longer than when it is embedded within a carrier phrase. This suggests that the single word behaves like a full intonational phrase where the final syllable is lengthened. The durational variation observed here is similar to that of lexical vowels when they vary in duration as a function of their prosodic position. These results suggest that CC clusters are not favorable within coda positions in this dialect. This is so despite the fact that underlying sequences do not violate the sonority sequencing principle.

المراجع

Abu-Mansour, M. (1990). Epenthesis, Gemination and Syllable Structure, in M. Eid & J. McCarthy (ed.). Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics II, John Benjamin Publishing, Amsterdam, 167-191.

Azra, A., Lahrouch, M., Ingleby, M. (2009). Vowel Epenthesis, Acoustics and Phonology Patterns in Moroccan Arabic. Interspeech 2008, 2008, Brisbane, Austria. 1178-1181.

Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (1992-2003). PRAAT (a system for doing phonetics) was developed by at the Phonetic Sciences department at the University of Amsterdam.

Boudlal, A. (2001). Constraint Interaction in the Phonology and Morphology of Casablanca Moroccan Arabic, Unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Mohammed V.

Broselow, Ellen. 1976. The Phonology of Egyptian Arabic. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Cowell, M. W. (2005). A reference grammar of Syrian Arabic. Washington D.C: Georgetown University Press.

Elgadi, A. (1986). Tripolitanian Arabic phonology and morphology: a generative

approach. PhD thesis. Georgetown University.

Elramli, Y. (2012). Assimilation in the Phonology of a Libyan Arabic Dialect: A Constraint-based approach. PhD dissertation. Newcastle University.

Gafos, A., Hoole, P., Roon, D and Zeroual, C. (2010). Variation in Overlap and Phonological Grammar in Moroccan Arabic Clusters, In Laboratory Phonology X, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin/New York.

Gouskova, M. and Hall, N. (2007). Levantine Arabic Epenthesis: Phonetics, Phonology and Learning. Variation, Gradience and Frequency in Phonology Workshop, Poster.

Haddad, G. (1984). Problems and Issues in the phonology of Lebanese Arabic. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ingleby, M., and Baothman, F. (2002) Empty Nuclei in Arabic Speech Patterns and the Diacritic Sukuun, in S. Boudelaa. (ed.). Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XVI, John Benjamin Publishing, Amsterdam, 95-102.

R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.