Harmony and Metrical Structure in Palestinian Arabic

Examples of non-local phonological processes that are bound by prosodic domains are expected in the world’s phonologies. In other words, we should anticipate cases where the metrical foot constrains vowel harmony. Intuitively, it seems like a natural interaction. However, the notion of vowel harmony bound by the metrical foot has only been sparsely proposed in the literature (Abu-Salim 1987, Hualde 1989). Both of these analyses antedate the most recent widely accepted framework in phonology, Optimality Theory (OT, Prince and Smolensky 1993). In this paper, I analyze an asymmetric instance of this expectation within OT, which to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be undertaken. This dependency is asymmetric because harmony is bound in only one direction by the metrical foot. Following Abu-Salim (1987), I contend that regressive spreading of the feature class color is constrained by the metrical foot edge in Palestinian Arabic (PA). Color is defined as the feature class containing both [back] and [round] (Odden 1991, Selkirk 1991, Padgett 1995a). I account for this fact by adopting the constraint CRISPEDGE (Itô and Mester 1999), which was formulated as an