Phonology-based perusal of English loanwords encliticized with the Arabic second-person possessive morpheme /ək/ in QAD

Abstract

The current paper investigated the trend in modern Arabic colloquial dialect spoken by young Qunfudhah Arabic Dialect speakers to add the Arabic possessive enclitic /ək/ to the English loanwords when addressing a second person (e.g. [ʃɔːrt.ək] ‘your short’, [dʒækɪt.tək] ‘your jacket. Using a descriptive approach, a number of loanwords encliticized with the Arabic second-person possessive morphemes /ək/ which were elicited from 45 participants were analyzed and presented. The main purpose of the current paper was to find out the role of vowel length in determining the output of the loanword after adding the Arabic possessive enclitic morpheme /ək/. Data analysis based on syllable structure and Optimality Theory showed that the output of these English loanwords varied according to the type of the vowel preceding the coda of the syllable. It is evident that when adding the Arabic enclitic /ək/ to monosyllabic or disyllabic words that contain a short vowel, the coda of the syllable becomes geminate. Alternatively, if the words contain long vowels or diphthongs, the gemination does not take place.

Keywords

• Loanwords
• morphology
• Optimality Theory
• phonology
• QAD
• syllable