Acoustic properties of underlying and derived contrasts in Bedouin Meccan Arabic

Abstract

In recent years, studies have come to the fore to accentuate the role of phonetics in phonology in opposition to the traditional feedforward models. One such instance is the exploration of the phonetic process of incomplete neutralization in which remnant of phonology are reflected in the phonetics. For example, Gouskova & Hall (2009) found that epenthetic vowels in Lebanese varied in their surface structure compared to lexical vowels, especially in the acoustic measures of duration and F2. That is, a zero~vowel alternation in the epenthetic case is realized shorter and lower than a comparative lexical vowel. In this dissertation, two studies were conducted to contribute to the debate of the relationship between phonetics and phonology while, at the same time, contributing to the dialectal studies of Arabic with focus on data elicited from Bedouin Meccan Arabic. The first study consisted of two experiments related to the process of epenthesis in Bedouin Meccan Arabic. In the first epenthesis experiment, epenthetic vowels were compared to lexical vowels in which the findings did not suggest a process of incomplete neutralization; rather, it showed that the epenthetic vowels have likely grammaticalized and are no longer distinguishable from underlying lexical vowels. In the second epenthesis experiment, I explored two types of epenthesis in BMA against each other: segmental vs syllabic. These two types share the epenthetic vowel quality [a]. This experiment revealed that syllabic epenthesis was significantly different from segmental epenthesis. This result came in opposition to the proposed hypothesis in which the segmental-a was significantly differentiated from syllabic-a in duration and F1. Nevertheless, further investigation is required which can deepen our understanding of this found significance and whether it is an artifact of the experiment or is reflective of the grammaticalized nature of segmental epenthesis compared to the productive process of syllabic epenthesis. In the second study, shortening of the medial superheavy syllables was explored. Two experiments were conducted for the second study in which the first treated the two types of the medial superheavy vowel as one, whereas the second separated them. The overall result of both experiments demonstrates a case of incomplete neutralization where the shortening of the medial superheavy indicates a vowel length that is situated between a long and a short lexical vowel leaning toward the long vowel. This, I argue, results from the bimoraicity phonological demands which the phonetics is able to access to interpret such nuanced change. This finding has an implication on the relationship between phonetics and phonology suggesting a larger role for phonetics in phonology. It proposes that phonetics can access deeper levels of phonology, particularly the moraic information, so that it can implement the subphonemic distinction between the normal long vowel and the medial superheavy vowel. This assumption poses a challenge to traditional feedforward models in which phonetics is anticipated to have access only to the output of phonology. The second experiment echoes similar sentiment and further expounds on the relationship between the two types of the medial superheavy syllable (derived vs. geminate). It indicates that while the derived CVVC syllables produced tangible, functional outcomes that likely contribute to perception, the geminate task only yielded statistical significance with a difference that is below the discrimination threshold. This by-task distinction raises intriguing questions with regard to the nature of incomplete naturalization and whether its purpose is to enhance perception or is purely phonologically driven.