This is a morphophonological study of noun plurality in Jebbali, a Modern South Arabian language spoken in the mountains and coastal plains of Dhofar, Oman. It has a twofold goal: (1) it documents the diverse shapes of noun plurals in Jebbali and (2) provides a formal analysis o…
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The present study investigates how information about contrasts is employed in the grammar. It is proposed that contrast preservation exists as an independent principle, which, within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), is formalized as a family of ran…
Pharyngeal consonants, low back vowels, segments with secondary pharyngealization, and vowels with retracted tongue root positions all involve some constriction in the pharynx. But there is no consensus among phoneticians and phonologists about how to describe these actions and …
In this dissertation I propose a rank-ordering model of EVAL. This model differs from classic OT as follows: In classic OT, EVAL distinguishes the best candidate from the losers, but does not distinguish between different losers. I argue that EVAL imposes a harmonic rank-orderin…
Phonological acquisition is a topic that has fascinated researchers trying to solve the puzzle of how children learn to talk. A review of the literature provides a large body of information about the acquisition of English phonology. The study of Portuguese phonology is a rapidl…
L'intelligence ne se nourrit pas de responses mais de questions.--Albert Einstein Dans cette these, nous examinons un aspect fondamental de la phonologie et de la morphologie du wolof, une langue ouest africaine parlee principalement au Senegal et en Gambie, soit celui des alter…
Instantiative Phonology presents a model of grammatical organization whose conceptual orientation arises from the Communication System Hypothesis, the notion that natural languages are communication systems and as such have properties predicted by the Mathematical Theory of Comm…
A great deal of current work in phonology discusses the functional grounding of phonological patterns. This dissertation proposes that functional factors can motivate phonological constraints in two ways. ‘Functionally grounded’ constraints are induced from learners' immediate l…
This thesis discusses some phonological facts about Emirati Arabic, which is an Arabic variety spoken in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of the gulf countries. It includes a description of the phonology component: consonants and vowels. The main focus of this thesis is on th…
The intent of the present course of inquiry is to examine historical Persian phonology in light of advances in Optimality Theory (OT) as applied to language change and variation, and in doing so to present a historical reconstruction of Proto-Modern-Persian (henceforth Proto-Per…
This dissertation investigates two issues that deal with the physical attributes of a class of speech sounds made with a constriction in the back part of the vocal tract, called the gutturals (they include the uvulars, uvularized, pharyngeal, and laryngeal sounds). The first iss…
The main objective of this study is to describe the phonology of 9abady Arabic (9A), a Bedouin Jordanian dialect that has not been investigated before, and to provide an analysis in light of recent phonological theories (autosegmental phonology and feature geometry). The study i…
This dissertation contributes to the field of Semitic linguistics by providing a formal analysis of the phonology and morphology of Tetouani Moroccan Arabic (TMA) within the framework of Lexical Phonology (LP), exploring the implications of the data for this theory. It is based …
This study is an attempt to address some problems in Arabic morphology and phonology which have serious consequences for morphological and phonological theories. As regards morphology, it is argued in contradistinction to orthodox treatments that roots and patterns are not appro…
This dissertation explores the phonology of Makkan Arabic at both the lexical and post-lexical levels employing Prince and Smolensky's Optimality Theory (OT) and Kiparsky's (2000) Stratal-OT. OT models the phonological grammar as a set of constraints which are ranked, violable a…
This study examined whether explicit instruction in phonetics and the phonologies of English and Arabic improved the sound production and recognition skills of adult native speakers of English learning Arabic as a foreign language. The study utilized an intervention strategy tha…
This dissertation is a quantitative study of linguistic variation in the Damascus speech community. The research material is based on data drawn from tape-recorded sociolinguistic interviews with 46 speakers, 23 men and 23 women, of different ages and educational backgrounds. Th…
Existing formal representations of Arabic emphatic and guttural sounds are ill-motivated articulatorily and suffer from descriptive and analytic inadequacies. This dissertation aims to clarify our understanding of the articulatory attributes of these sounds as reflected in their…