Vocalic elision in Iraqi Arabic : evidence from the applicability of the output generating schemes

Abstract EN

This paper is concerned with a detailed description and analysis of vocalic elision in the Iraqi Arabic .

The variety investigated in this article is Basra Iraqi Arabic since it is the native dialect of the researcher.

It is spoken in the southern part of Iraq- in the city of Basraby educated and non-educated speakers alike.

It has its own lexical and phonological peculiarities which render it a distinct variety among different speakers of Iraqi Arabic.

The analysis of the available data via deletion generative rules and Optimality Theory candidate evaluation scheme (in terms of generative phonology) suggests that vocalic elision in Iraqi Arabic has a crucial efficacy on syllabic phonotactics, syllabification, and sonority profiling.

Reduction of the original syllables and reconcatenation of phonemes are distinctly traceable.

Vocalic segments show identical phonetic contexts within historical elision, while context variation is tangibly elicited within connected speech elision.

In Optimality terms, three competing faithfulness constraints are operating to screen the input candidate.

These are DEP, IDEN, and MAX constraints.

The first two are eliminated from further consideration since they are highly ranked.

The only surviving constraint is MAX (no deletion) which is lowest-ranked.

It has been proven that it is the predominant constraint that generates the surface elided forms.

To no surprise, it has been unveiled that markedness constraints have null competing role in generating the optimal phonetic outputs.