Emphatic assimilation across morpheme boundaries in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This study aims to examine emphatic assimilation across morpheme boundaries in Jordanian Arabic (JA). Our research is based on word-list data comprising 86 words uttered by 12 native speakers of JA, recorded and acoustically analyzed in Praat for a total of 1032 tokens. The consonants of the bound morphemes tested include the genitive/accusative suffix-initial consonant /h/, the active participle prefix-final consonant /t/, and the definite article-final consonant /l/, in terms of emphasis. The results firstly show that the phoneme /t/ undergoes total emphatic assimilation when followed by a coronal obstruent. Secondly, when the phoneme /l/ is followed by any emphatic coronal, it undergoes total emphatic assimilation. Thirdly, the phoneme /h/ undergoes total emphatic assimilation when preceded by an emphatic voiceless fricative or an emphatic voiceless plosive. Fourthly, the directionality of assimilation across morpheme boundaries is either progressive with the suffix /-h/ or regressive with the prefixes /t-/ and /l-/. Finally, emphasis is found to be an important feature that correlates with assimilation.

Keywords

• Linguistics
• morphophonology
• assimilation
• Jordanian Arabic
• emphasis