Vowel unpredictability in Hijazi Arabic monosyllabic verbs

Abstract

We study the distribution of vowels in the monosyllabic verbs of Urban Hijazi Arabic, showing that speakers use the presence of a root emphatic consonant to partially predict the quality of stem vowels. The effect of the emphatic is observed in the lexicon, and is productively extended to nonce verbs, showing that speakers generalize over lexical representations that include both vowels and consonants; the purely consonantal representations that are commonly assumed for Arabic are insufficient to capture speakers' knowledge of consonant-vowel interactions. We propose a probabilistic analysis that learns lexical trends from surface forms and extends them productively to nonce words.

Consonant-vowel Interactions Inform Paradigm Organization in Egyptian Arabic

“…Blanc 1964). For example, Ahyad (2019) and Ahyad & Becker (2020) found preference for imperfective [a] with pharyngeals and for [u] with pharyngealized alveolars, which mirrors the findings in this study. While they did not discuss the predictability of the perfective vowel, a look at their corpus finds little consonantal effects.…”

“…Wazn I is also unique in having idiosyncratic vowel alternations between perfective and imperfective forms, whereas other awzaan typically have one unique vowel pattern which does not alternate. Surveys and quantitative studies on several Arabic dialects report effects of root consonants on vowel choices which range from gradient (Egyptian: Abdel-Massih et al 1979;Modern Standard: McCarthy 1994;Hijazi: Ahyad 2019, Ahyad & Becker 2020 to categorical (Muslim Baghdad: Blanc 1964; Palestinian : Herzallah 1990). Predictive generalizations can also be made over the vowels of the two forms (McOmber 1995 on Modern Standard).…”

“…The consonant predictors assess whether a consonant with a particular place of articulation is present in the word; they were used to investigate whether avoidance of more marked consonant-vowel co-occurrences has an effect. Place of articulation was chosen to be the main consonant property investigated because consonant effects on vowel alternations in other dialects generally involve place features (e.g., Ahyad & Becker 2020). The place of articulation classes are listed below.…”

Reduplication in Urban Hijazi Arabic Dialect Spoken in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia

“…Urban HA is spoken in the cities of Makkah, Madinah, Jeddah, and Taif". Many researchers, such as Ahyad & Becker (2020), Alqahtani & Sandreson (2019), Alzaidi, Y. Xu & A. Xu (2019), Alwazna (2020), and Alzaidi (2018), have examined the UHA dialect in relation to various topics. However, the concept of reduplication in the Makkah, Madinah, and Jeddah dialects has received little discussion in the literature (cf.…”