Modeling Palestinian Retracted Tongue Root (RTR) Harmony into Optimality Theory

Abstract

Palestinian Arabic emphatic sounds/ T, D, S/ produced with the back

of the tongue retracted (RTR) have emphatic influence spreading over

consonants and vowels and thus causing harmony between the emphatic

sounds and the vowels and consonants of the word. However, this spreading

is not uniform. For example, it spreads either to the right, or to the left, and

sometimes it is blocked. This paper unfolds the constraints at work that yield

the outcome forms after the emphasis is at play in the word. Moreover, this

paper ranks the constraints and models them using the terms of Optimality

Theory. Besides dealing with the emphatic sounds/ T, D, S/, the paper proves

that the sound/r/ has two varieties in Northern Gaza dialect: emphatic /R/ and

non- emphatic/r/. Like other emphatics, the influence of the emphatic /R/ may

spread both ways: right and left, or it can be blocked by some constraints.

These constraints include neighboring coronals in addition to high front

vowels. The high front vowel /ii/ in this context functions either as a segment

or as a morpheme indicating possessive “my”. In the former case the emphatic

influence spreads, whereas in the later it does not, thus allowing phonology

to outrank morphology.