Emphasis spread in the Djelfa dialect of Algerian Arabic

Abstract

Abstract The paper documents Emphasis spread in the Djelfa dialect (DJ) of Algerian Arabic with a special examination of the emphatic segments /sˤ/, /tˤ/ and /ðˤ/. If a given word contains an underlying emphatic segment, the nearby segments are also realized with emphasis. The dialect, however, differentiates two types of emphasis spread: unbounded leftward spread that propagates from the emphatic segment till the beginning of the phonological word; and bounded rightward spread that is blocked by a set of segments /i/, /j/, /ʃ/ and /ʒ/. Of particular interest in the current investigation is the behavior of emphasis spread (ES) with respect to morpheme boundaries. While the left morpheme edge is realized with ES, the right morpheme boundary is deemed resistant to ES unless an underlying emphatic segment falls prior to a -V(C) suffix. This is well captured by the interplay between the markedness constraints FAITH [RTR] SUFFIX and SHARE (RTR).