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Phonetic neutralization in Palestinian Arabic vowel shortening, with implications for lexical organization

Summary

Hall investigates whether a phonological rule in Palestinian Arabic erases a contrast entirely or leaves acoustic traces. The rule is closed syllable shortening, where an underlyingly long vowel becomes short in certain CV:CC contexts. Examples are /faːq-ʃ/ → faqʃ 'didn't wake' with the negative suffix and /ӡaːb-l-ak/ → ӡablak 'brought to you' with the dative suffix. Word pairs recorded from 74 speakers showed that shortened long vowels and lexically short vowels have the same duration, so neutralization appears complete. This differs from the author's earlier work on Levantine vowel epenthesis, where traces did remain. Speakers also split by region: some shorten only before /-ʃ/ and keep the vowel long before /-l/, which the author attributes to paradigm leveling. Comparing the two processes, Hall argues that spelling is not the driver. More fossilized, morphologized rules seem to neutralize fully. She proposes that such rules break links in the mental lexicon that would run through the abstract CV word pattern. The work widens a typology dominated by Indo-European languages and final devoicing.

Key points

  • 74 Palestinian Arabic speakers produced word pairs. Shortened vowels showed no measurable duration difference from lexically short vowels.
  • Speakers from Jerusalem and the Little Triangle shorten before negative /-ʃ/ but not before dative /-l/, producing forms like ӡaːblak. This contradicts analyses (Abu-Salim 1986; Younes 1995) that treat both cases as one rule.
  • Earlier Lebanese epenthesis results showed incomplete neutralization. For some speakers, epenthetic vowels were more central, with F2 differences of about 50 Hz.
  • Almihmadi's (2011) literature survey counts:
    • incomplete neutralization found in 32 studies;
    • complete neutralization found in 13;
    • 17 reporting neutralization complete only under certain conditions;
    • 60 of the 71 studies reviewed are on Indo-European languages.
  • Prior quantity cases differ much more than devoicing cases:
    • Japanese derived long vowels were 32 ms shorter than underlying ones (Braver & Kawahara).
    • Turkish derived long vowels were 31 ms longer (Rudin).
    • Vowels before devoiced /d/ were only about 3.5 ms longer than before /t/ (Warner et al.).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The author warns that "complete" results may just reflect low statistical power, and that null findings tend to go unpublished, so a reported absence of an effect needs scrutiny.
  • I2. An opaque rule survives when the same word also has a transparent surface variant that supports it; without such a variant, speakers level the paradigm.
  • I3. A process that theory describes as a single rule actually splits by region, depending on which suffix triggers it.
  • I4. Fine distinctions seem to persist mainly where they prevent surface homophony, as epenthesis would otherwise merge noun/verb pairs.
  • I5. Whether related forms influence each other depends on what abstract structure links them in the lexicon: shared root, CV pattern, or whole stored form.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): When an evaluation shows "no difference" between two systems, report the size of the effect it could have detected, alongside negative controls, so a null result is not read as equivalence.
  • I2 (tokens): Morphology analyzers could link optional variants of one word (with and without epenthesis) more tightly than different inflected forms, which would help explain lemma choices.
  • I3 (tree): In UD dialect conversion, do not assume one rule covers all contexts; check each trigger separately against data from each source.
  • I4 (tokens): The tagger could keep weak cues (features, context) chiefly for homographs where they actually resolve ambiguity, rather than tracking every possible distinction.
  • I5 (world): When compiling lexical knowledge, state explicitly which relation links two entries, so that any influence one has on the other can be traced and explained.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics Semitic languages

 Institutions

Also on the byline: California State University, Long Beach.

Cite

Cite as Nancy Hall. 2017. Phonetic neutralization in Palestinian Arabic vowel shortening, with implications for lexical organization. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.257

@article{hall2017phonetic,
  title = {{Phonetic neutralization in Palestinian Arabic vowel shortening, with implications for lexical organization}},
  author = {Nancy Hall},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.257},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.257}
}

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  39. How to cite this article: Nancy, Hall. 2017. Phonetic neutralization in Palestinian Arabic vowel shortening, with implications for lexical organization. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 48. 1–23, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.257 ↗ our card
  40. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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