Stress Patterns of Bedouin Hijazi Arabic: An OT Account

Syncope Induced Metrical Opacity as a Weight Effect

In many languages, loss of an underlying vowel results in stress patterns which are atypical for the language as a whole. For example, in Bedouin Hijazi Arabic (Al-Mozainy 1981, Al-Mozainy et al. 1985, McCarthy 1999), syncope of /a/ in an open antepenult creates words with stress on a light (CV) penult rather than the antepenult, the typical pattern for words with a light penult: underlying //i...

Animacy and Child Grammar: an OT account

It is a well known fact about German that animacy plays a role in determining the word order of verbal arguments. In children’s production, animacy not only affects the order of the direct and indirect object in non-canonical double object constructions, but it also has an influence on the overt dative case marking of the indirect object. Optimality Theory readily accounts for these data in usi...

Restrictions on Direction of Voicing Assimilation: an Ot Account*

In Lombardi (1996) I propose a set of constraints within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993) that account for patterns of obstruent devoicing and assimilation phenomena in the world's languages. Rerankings of these constraints produce only patterns in which voicing assimilation is regressive. However, there are cases of progressive voicing assimilation. I will argue in this paper that...

Going the Distance: Synchronic Chain Shifts in Optimality Theory

Synchronic chain shifts, whereby certain sounds are promoted (or demoted) stepwise along some phonetic scale in some context, are one of the classic cases of opaque rule interactions (see, e.g., Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1977). If, for example, /a/ raises to [e], and /e/ raises to [i], it would appear that the /e/ ® [i] raising must precede /a/ ® [e] raising in the derivation, otherwise /a/ and...

The predictability of vowel alternations in Urban Hijazi Arabic imperfective nonce forms