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Part of
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXI: Papers from the annual symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Norman, Oklahoma, 2017
Edited by Amel Khalfaoui and Youssef A. Haddad
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 8] 2019
► pp. 3–30

Incomplete phonetic neutralization

What Arabic can bring to the debate

Arabic has played a central role in the development of phonological theory, with the challenge of describing its complex and interacting alternations spurring theoretical developments from the cycle to variants of Optimality Theory. The phonetic study of these alternations, however, has attracted less attention. This chapter gives an overview of one controversial topic in phonetic research, the incomplete phonetic neutralization of contrasts, in which evidence from Arabic has only recently begun to enter the decades-old debate. Some Arabic phonological alternations, such as Levantine vowel epenthesis, are shown to be incompletely neutralizing, while others, such as Levantine vowel shortening, appear to involve complete neutralization. I propose that patterns of phonetic neutralization are affected by the root-and-pattern morphology of Arabic and may shed light on lexical organization in such systems. Incomplete neutralization results when a form that has undergone a phonological change is still lexically linked to its original timing template. The fossilization of older phonological processes leads to lexical reorganization in the form of loss of such linkages.
Keywords: incomplete neutralization, Arabic, epenthesis, vowel shortening, phonetics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • Incomplete neutralization
    • Possible causes of incomplete neutralization
    • The spreading activation hypothesis
    • Research gaps
  • 2.Studies of phonetic neutralization in Arabic
    • Vowel epenthesis, and possible influence of sociolinguistic variation
    • Closed syllable shortening
    • Unstressed vowel shortening
    • No effect of orthography
    • Does incomplete neutralization have a functional role?
  • 3.Towards a spreading activation analysis for Arabic
    • Arabic morphology and the mental lexicon
    • Which words share timing patterns?
    • Representation of alternations: Evidence from priming
    • Representing vowel alternations in the lexicon
  • 4.Conclusion and future directions
  • Acknowledgement
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 8 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.8.01hal
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