Abstract
This paper aimed at testing McCarthy’s proposal of deletion within the framework of Harmonic Serialism (HS) (2018). According to him, the place feature of a target consonant is first delinked to a glottal and then the rest of the features are totally lost. However, the gradual operations of the t-deletion, for example, are not logical due to the distance in place of articulation between the target alveolar and the default glottal in the first HS step. In addition, since the glottal sound is a back sound, it needs a lot of effort from the muscles to produce it. Therefore, reducing an alveolar segment to a glottal becomes heavier than the alveolar sound itself. In investigating the Taizi Yemeni Arabic glottal deletion as in /madrasah/ (مدرسة ), ‘school’, which becomes [madrasa] or [madrasa:], the phoneme /h/ meets a single step as it is regarded as a placeless segment. The assumption of featural reduction of place and then total deletion fails to improve gradual harmony and, therefore, cannot be modeled in a harmonic improvement tableau. This is a contradictory logic and goes against the HS gradualness system of deletion, in which deletion is a two-step process. As a consequence, it is suggested to deal with deletion as a one-step process rather than a two-step process.
تاريخ النشر
30/12/2022
الناشر
Les Annales de l’Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis (ISSN : 0330- 793X)
د. ميادة نجيب المقطري | Mayada Nageeb Al-Maktary | 7159