Examples:
(See Comments
for key to special characters used.) |
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The present perfective generally has the structure CVCCVC as in the forms,
'he drinks', 'you write', 'we swim', shown on the left just below.
However, the structure is instead CCVCVC when the second consonant is guttural
and the preceding vowel is low. This is shown in the second column in the
table below. If these forms followed the general pattern, illustrated
in the leftmost column, we would expect the forms in the fourth column (the
ill-formedness of these forms is indicated by an asterisk). (Al-Mozainy
1981, Al-Mozainy, Bley-Vroman & McCarthy 1985). In such cases, it
can be assumed that the guttural consonant metathesizes with a preceding vowel,
thus surfacing in prevocalic position, i.e. /yakhum/ -> [yhakum].
| yaSr'ab |
'he drinks’ |
yh'akum |
*yah'kum |
'he rules’ |
| taktib |
'you write’ |
t¿arif |
*ta¿rif |
'she knows’ |
| nasbah' |
'we swim’ |
nxat'uf |
*naxt'uf |
'we snatch’ |
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Conditions:
(See Comments
for key to special characters used.) |
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The guttural consonant needs to (a) follow a low vowel, and (b) precede
another consonant.
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Motivation: |
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Acoustic and Auditory Similarity (Hume 1997, 1998): The contiguity
of a consonant to a vowel with similar perceptual cues is one a motivating
factor of Bedouin Arabic metathesis.
Perceptual Enhancement (Hume 1997): Compressed duration in
word-medial position, in conjunction with insufficient spectral change resulting
from contiguity to a preceding low vowel contributes to the vulnerability
of the guttural consonant (Beckman & Edwards 1990, Wright 1996). By metathesizing
the guttural consonant with the preceding low vowel, the guttural consonant
is positioned in prevocalic position where its place cues are more salient
given a more abrupt spectral change typically associated with this context
.
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Related processes: |
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Contiguity of a guttural consonant to a low vowel in coda position is not
ruled out categorically; a guttural can occur in absolute word-final position,
e.g. nasbah' ‘we swim’.
Hume (1997) suggests an account in line with the
perceptual cue-based analyses , drawing on the observations of Beckman &
Edwards (1990) concerning word-final lengthening. Segments
in word-final position are generally longer than those in
word-medial position, with lengthening being even more pronounced
at the end of an intonational phrase. Along these lines, it
is reasonable to assume that the perceptual cues to the guttural’s
place in Bedouin Arabic are more salient in word-final position
than in postvocalic, preconsonantal position, given the possibility
of greater length.
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Comments: |
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Special Symbols:
S = voiceless alveo-palatal fricative
¿ = voiced pharyngeal fricative
r' = emphatic 'r'
h' = emphatic 'h'
t' = voiceless alveolar emphatic stop
Last updated: 10/24/2001
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References: |
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Al-Mozainy, Hamza Qublan. 1981. Vowel Alternations in a Bedouin
Hijazi Arabic Dialect: Abstractness and Stress. PhD dissertation. University
of Texas at Austin.
Al-Mozainy, Hamza Qublan, Robert Bley-Vroman & John J. McCarthy.
1985. Stress Shift and Metrical Structure. Linguistic Inquiry 16, 1. 135-144.
Beckman, Mary & Jan Edwards. 1990. Lengthening and Shortening
and the Nature of Prosodic Constituency. In J. Kingston and M. Beckman (eds.),
Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the Grammar and Physics of Speech.
New York: CUP. 152-178.
Hume, Elizabeth. 1997. Towards an Explanation of Consonant/Consonant
Metathesis. Draft, v. 1.
Hume, Elizabeth. 1998. The Role of Perceptibility in Consonant/Consonant
Metathesis. In Blake, Susan, Eun-Sook Kim, and Kimary Shahin (eds.), WCCFL
XVII Proceedings. Stanford: CSLI. 293-307.
Wright, Richard. 1996. Consonant Clusters and Cue Preservation
in Tsou. PhD dissertation. UCLA.
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