The Even Yearbook 16 (2024)
#124
volume 16 (2024)
pages 86-102
author Firas Shbeeb
title Vowel epenthesis in the Aleppine dialect
DOI http://doi.org/10.57133/evenyrbk.24sh
keywords vowel epenthesis, Aleppine Arabic, CVCC clusters, phonotactics, resyllabification
abstract This study investigates the phonological process of vowel epenthesis in the Aleppine Dialect (AD) of Arabic, an urban variety spoken in northern Syria. While vowel insertion has been widely documented in many Arabic dialects, its behaviour in AD remains under-described. The analysis is based on a set of 23 CVCC lexical items and their occurrence in different prosodic environments, elicited from native Aleppine speakers. The study describes the distribution of the high short vowel /ɪ/ in final consonant clusters and across word boundaries, with particular attention to cluster type, sonority profile, and position in the phrase. The data show that AD systematically inserts /ɪ/ to break up final CVCC clusters in isolated words, even when these clusters conform to the Sonority Sequencing Principle, indicating a general ban on complex codas word-finally. Across word boundaries, however, epenthesis is not uniform: it is regularly blocked when a following vowel allows resyllabification of the final consonant, and it is often absent when the final cluster is homorganic or involves a sonorant–obstruent sequence, but retained with more marked obstruent–obstruent codas. Comparisons with other Arabic dialects (Jordanian, Cairene, Moroccan, Sudanese, Omani, Iraqi) situate AD within a broader typology of epenthesis strategies and highlight both shared and dialect-specific repair patterns. The findings emphasise the role of positional and cluster-specific phonotactics in shaping epenthesis in AD and identify residual patterns that invite further formal analysis in future work.
PDF full text
raw text 24sh-raw
refs ⟨BibTeX⟩
⟨RIS⟩
⟨txt⟩
