Rhotic Emphasis And Uvularization In Moroccan Arabic

This study investigates the phonological behavior of secondarily post-velarized (‘emphatic’) consonants in Colloquial Moroccan Arabic, focusing primarily on variant pronunciations of the approximant /r/ and the relationship of pharyngeal to uvular articulation. In certain contexts, /r/ independently exhibits phonetic characteristics similar to those of the primary ‘emphatic’ phonemes /ṭ ḍ ṣ/, and for many speakers a combination of borrowing and analogy has extended the context of emphatic variants outside of the original conditioning environment, resulting in a pattern of contrast that approaches phonemic status. Through analysis of interviews with individual speakers, I establish the parameters of phonetic and phonological variation in /r/ and evaluate the phonemic character of these segments through processes associated with phonological emphasis, as well as investigating how post-velar coarticulations in Moroccan Arabic align with uvular and/or pharyngeal place in phonetic and structural terms. My findings indicate that the rhotic emphasis constrast remains both distributionally and phonetically ambiguous at the level of the individual, and that its variation is not sociolinguistically determined. Furthermore, there is evidence that the ambiguity of the contrast is diachronically stable. I propose that this behavior reflects an underlying representational ambiguity related to the perceptual confusability of uvular and upper pharyngeal place and to the phonetic imprecision of rhotics in general. The document is structured as follows: first, I provide an overview of work on phonological categories, representational frameworks for ambiguous variants, and post-velar place specification (Chapter 1), then proceed to describe and problematize the relevant phonological phenomena in Moroccan Arabic (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 describes the methods used in fieldwork, data collection and preparation, while Chapters 4 and 5 present the results of my speaker analysis for Fessi Arabic with respect to acoustic correlates of post-velarization spread and rhotic emphasis distributions respectively. Finally, Chapter 6 offers a theoretical framework for interpreting these results and suggests some areas for further research

QUESTIONS AMAZIGHES (TACHLHIT) À L'INTERFACE DE LA PHONÉTIQUE ET DE LA PHONOLOGIE

The main concern of my research activities bears on phonological units and questions their physical manifestations and psychological reality as well as their role in phonological grammar. My main source of evidence for my theoretical analyses is drawn from Tashlhiyt, an Amazigh (Berber) language spoken in Morocco. This summary, meant as a complement to my Habilitation mémoire « Questions amazighes (tachlhit) – A l’interface de la phonétique et de la phonologie », provides a synthesis of my work on three main topics. The first topic deals with syllable without vowels. The second topic is concerned with the phonetics and phonology of geminated phonemes. The third topic deals with laryngeal distinctive features and extends to the general issue of laryngeal-supralaryngeal coordination in speech.La préoccupation majeure de mes recherches porte sur la structure et le contenu des catégories phonologiques – trait, phonème, syllabe – et pose la triple question de la place de ces unités de base dans les systèmes phonologiques, de leurs manifestations physiques, et de leur réalité psychologique. Cette problématique, qui constitue un des objectifs fondamentaux de la recherche actuelle à l’interface de la phonétique et de la phonologie, est explorée en examinant plus spécifiquement le tachlhit, langue amazighe (berbère) parlée au Maroc. Au-delà de la richesse de son inventaire consonantique, c’est notamment l’extrême souplesse que cette langue offre pour former de séquences consonantiques qui l’a fait connaître à la communauté des phonologues et des phonéticiens. Locuteur natif du tachlhit, je me suis intéressé depuis ma thèse aux questions soulevées par cet embarras de consonnes dans une démarche alliant questionnements théoriques et investigations expérimentales. L’écriture de ce mémoire a été guidée par le désir de mettre en perspective mes recherches par rapport aux questionnements théoriques généraux sur les unités de représentation. En cela, elle reflète le souci constant de partir du tachlhit pour aborder des questions théoriques dépassant largement le cadre restreint des études amazighes

Syllable structure and syllabification in Al'ain Libyan Arabic

PhD ThesisThe variety of Arabic under investigation is one of the dialects spoken in a town on the Western Mountain (Nafuusa Mountain) in Libya. Its phonological characteristics are clearly different from what Harrama (1993) called the “Al-Jabal dialect,” which the inhabitants of the Western Mountain claim to speak. The current study is concerned with a variety spoken in the town of Riyayna (Or Alriyayna); mainly, Al’ain (henceforth identified as ALA). The objective of this thesis is to contribute a description of the phonology of a previously unexamined dialect, under a moraic approach. This approach has been adopted as the prominent role of the mora that has been established in literature by accounting for various phonological phenomena, such as vowel epenthesis (Itô, 1989) and compensatory lengthening (Hayes, 1989) (see Watson 2002). Thus, it is claimed for example, that the loss of the glottal stop in ALA is repaired by compensatory lengthening in words, such as: /biːr/ ~ /bɪʔr/, /raːs/ ~ /rʌʔs/, /juːmɪn/ ~ /joʔmɪn/ to satisfy the minimal moraicity requirement, or by gemination: /mɪjjah ~ mɪʔah/, /rɪjjah/ ~ /rɪʔah/ to satisfy the restriction of vowel-initial syllables, utterance-internally. Although, the main aim of the thesis is to examine the syllable inventories and syllabification process in ALA, focus is placed on initial consonant clusters that are claimed to exist in a cluster-resistant dialect, where it is argued that such clusters strictly occur in certain environments. Emphatics and emphatic allophones are also phonologically investigated claiming that, in addition to the four emphatic consonants, emphatic vowels (/ʌ/ and /ɑː/ in ALA) also exist in the dialect and similarly cause emphasis spread. Vowel-initial syllables is another issue whose existence in ALA is asserted in this study demonstrating that although they might surface with a glottal-stop-like gesture, they should still be treated as underlying onsetless syllables because their behaviour is different from syllables that underlyingly begin with a glottal stop. Finally, stress assignment procedures in ALA are interesting in following many North African dialects by ignoring, in many cases, syllable weight and having a tendency to stress final syllables. This is also expressed in the study.Libyan Ministry of Higher Educatio

Arabic Fluency Assessment: Procedures for Assessing Stuttering in Arabic Preschool Children

The primary aim of this thesis was to screen school-aged (4+) children for two separate types of fluency issues and to distinguish both groups from fluent children. The two fluency issues are Word-Finding Difficulty (WFD) and other speech disfluencies (primarily stuttering). The cohort examined consisted of children who spoke Arabic and English. We first designed a phonological assessment procedure that can equitably test Arabic and English children, called the Arabic English non-word repetition task (AEN_NWR). Riley’s Stuttering Severity Instrument (SSI) is the standard way of assessing fluency for speakers of English. There is no standardized version of SSI for Arabic speakers. Hence, we designed a scheme to measure disfluency symptoms in Arabic speech (Arabic fluency assessment). The scheme recognizes that Arabic and English differ at all language levels (lexically, phonologically and syntactically). After the children with WFD had been separated from those with stuttering, our second aim was to develop and deliver appropriate interventions for the different cohorts. Specifically, we aimed to develop treatments for the children with WFD using short procedures that are suitable for conducting in schools. Children who stutter are referred to SLTs to receive the appropriate type of intervention. To treat WFD, another set of non-word materials was designed to include phonemic patterns not used in the speaker’s native language that are required if that speaker uses another targeted language (e.g. phonemic patterns that occur in English, but not Arabic). The goal was to use these materials in an intervention to train phonemic sequences that are not used in the child’s additional language such as the phonemic patterns that occur in English, but not Arabic. The hypothesis is that a native Arabic speaker learning English would be expected to struggle on those phonotactic patterns not used in Arabic that are required for English. In addition to the screening and intervention protocols designed, self-report procedures are desirable to assess speech fluency when time for testing is limited. To that end, the last chapter discussed the importance of designing a fluency questionnaire that can assess fluency in the entire population of speakers. Together with the AEN_NWR, the brief self-report instrument forms a package of assessment procedures that facilitate screening of speech disfluencies in Arabic children (aged 4+) when they first enter school. The seven chapters, described in more detail below, together constitute a package that achieves the aims of identifying speech problems in children using Arabic and/or English and offering intervention to treat WFD

Phonological adaptation of English loanwords in Ammani Arabic

This thesis investigates the phonological adaptation of English loanwords in Ammani Arabic (AA) in order to enhance our understanding of phonological theory and of AA phonology. The thesis also serves as documentation of the dialect in a state of flux. In contrast to previous studies, this study accounts for the phonological adaptation of loanwords not only at the segmental level, but also at the suprasegmental/prosodic level, adopting moraic theory within an OT framework. To achieve this, a corpus of 407 established English loanwords are analysed as they are pronounced by 12 AA monolingual native speakers.The study reveals that the adaptation process is mainly phonological, albeit informed by phonetics and other linguistic factors. AA native phonology accounts for the numerous modifications that English loanwords undergo. It is shown that the adaptation process is geared towards unmarkedness in that faithfulness to the source input is violated in order to render the output unmarked. Unmarked structures in the adaptation process may arise even though their marked counterparts are equally attested in AA native phonology, giving rise to the Emergence of the Unmarked.With respect to segmental adaptation, results show that AA maps source segments onto their phonologically closest AA phonemes. However, source allophonic features that are contrastive in AA are faithfully mapped onto their AA phonemic counterparts. For syllabic adaptation, loanwords undergo a number of phonological processes, e.g. epenthesis and gemination, to accommodate ill-formed source syllables into AA phonotactic structure. The study shows that English source stress is mostly neglected in the adaptation process with stress assigned to the adapted phonological string according to AA stress constraints.The introduction of English loanwords has given rise to new data that invoked hidden phonological constraints that would have remained latent in AA phonology. This study has resulted in a better understanding of AA phonology by shedding light on various AA phonological aspects chief among which are gemination, stress assignment constraints, and syllable structure

Lexical Borrowings in Immigrant Speech: A Sociolinguistic Study of Ḥassāniyya Arabic Speakers in Medina (Saudi Arabia)

This study investigates lexical borrowings and the phonological processes associated with them as an outcome of the dialect contact situation in Medina (Saudi Arabia) between the Shanāqiṭa immigrant community, who immigrated to this holy city from Mauritania and who speak Ḥassāniyya Arabic, and the urban Hijazi community, who speak urban Hijazi Arabic. The study introduces to the reader the main phonological and morphological features of these two Arabic dialects and presents traditional and modern approaches towards lexical borrowings in Arabic. The present study adopts the quantitative sociolinguistic method which is widely used in sociolinguistic studies in order to analyse the speech of this immigrant community (focusing on borrowings from urban Hijazi Arabic), and correlates it with the social variables of age, educational attainment, ethnicity and gender. The study focuses on six phonological variables which are correlated with the social variables; these variables represent common phonological features which contrast both dialects. These phonological variables are divided into two groups: consonantal and vocalic variables. For the consonantal variables, the present study investigates the variation of three variables: de-affrication ([dʒ] → [ʒ]), lenition ([f] → [v]), and initial hamza dropping ([ʔ] → [Ø]). As for the vocalic variables, the research examines three variables: re-syllabification, consisting of initial [CV] and sequenced [CV.CV] → syncope, epenthesis and metathesis; diphthongisation: monophthongs → diphthongs; and vowel centralisation: (i), (u) → [ə]. The statistical data analysis reveals that age (generation) plays a central role in the phonological variation between the study participants when they borrow linguistic elements from urban Hijazi Arabic; ethnicity is the second most important factor. The analysis also shows that socio-cultural and socio-psychological factors facilitate the strong linguistic preservation of Ḥassāniyya Arabic by this immigrant community in Medina

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm