Liaison in Jordanian Arabic and Standard Arabic: Syntax-Prosody Interface

Abstract

Liaison in Arabic applies to words that end with the feminine marker /t/ even in masculine nouns and adjectives when they happen to have the feminine ending. In this paper, we study liaison in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and Standard Arabic (SA) from the standpoint of syntax-prosody interface. We study the mapping of syntactic phrases onto phonological ones when this process takes place. We argue that liaison in JA is syntactically governed; it occurs only in construct state nominals (CSNs). We compare our finding in JA to those of Standard Arabic (SA). We also present evidence that JA marks right edges of phonological phrase in this phrase-level phonological process. We account for the differences between CSNs, where liaison applies, and other noun phrases where it does not. Finally, we discuss liaison with enchainement which occurs when the second word of the construct state begins with the definite article Ɂal.