Vowel harmony in Yemeni IBBI Arabic : a minimalist approach

Abstract EN

This article aims to provide a Minimalist analysis of Vowel Harmony in Yemeni Ibbi Arabic.

Vowel Harmony has been tackled by a number of studies and scholars, employing several approaches such as segmental, suprasegmental, autosegmental.

However, though valuable, these approaches fail to provide a unified and comprehensive account, an account which probes all the phonological aspects of Vowel Harmony, and that could be applied cross-linguistically.

Therefore, in this article, we propose a Minimalist approach to the analysis of Vowel Harmony.

The approach we propose accounts for the phonological processes underlying Vowel Harmony, requiring only the necessary empirical coverage with the least amount of theoretical assumptions and representations.

Our proposal is based mainly on Mailhot and Reiss‘s (2007) conceptions of Search and Copy algorithm model, making use of Archiphonemic Underspecification Theory (Inkelas 1995; Reiss 2008) and linearization that is based on Chomsky's (1995) 'Bare Output Condition' and Idsardi and Shorey‘s (2007) linearization algorithm.