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Metathesis of Stop-Sibilant Clusters in Modern Hebrew: a Perceptual Investigation

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Metathesis of Stop-Sibilant Clusters in Modern Hebrew: a Perceptual Investigation Metathesis of Stop-Sibilant Clusters in Modern Hebrew: A Perceptual Investigation Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors Jones, Kyle Stewart Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 30/09/2021 09:11:20 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/621557 METATHESIS OF STOP-SIBILANT CLUSTERS IN MODERN HEBREW: A PERCEPTUAL INVESTIGATION by Kyle S. Jones ______________________________ Copyright © Kyle S. Jones 2016 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the SCHOOL OF MIDDLE EASTERN AND NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2016 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR The thesis titled Metathesis of Stop-Sibilant Clusters in Modern Hebrew: A Perceptual Investigation prepared by Kyle S. Jones has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for a master’s degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Kyle S. Jones APPROVED BY THESIS DIRECTOR This thesis has been approved on the date shown below: _________________________________ _July 5, 2016_ Samira Farwaneh Date Associate Professor of Arabic Linguistics 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to begin by thanking my advisor, Prof. Samira Farwaneh, and the other members of my committee, Prof. Adam Ussishkin and Prof. Mahmoud Azaz. I have had many stimulating discussions with Samira about aspects of Modern Hebrew and Arabic phonology and our mutual skepticism about Semitic roots. Taking her class on Arabic linguistics allowed me to add a new language to my linguistic repertoire, while strengthening my overall understanding of phonology and morphology. She has helped me tremendously, and I am very grateful for her support and encouragement. Adam, likewise, has given me much support, encouraging me to try DMDX and allowing me to conduct my perception experiment in the PsyCoL lab’s sound booth. Adam’s vast knowledge of Modern Hebrew linguistics has been incredibly useful as well, and his class on Modern Hebrew structure was an important influence on this work. I would also like to thank Prof. Natasha Warner, who taught me phonetics and allowed me to conduct this research under the IRB of her lab, the Douglass Phonetics Laboratory. I deeply appreciate her assistance with the pilot study and with this larger project. I am deeply indebted to my Hebrew instructors over the years, including Galia Franco, whose classes sparked my love for Modern Hebrew, Anat and Uri Maimon, whose third and fourth year Modern Hebrew classes were instrumental in improving my Modern Hebrew, and Prof. J. Edward Wright, who taught me the mechanics of Biblical Hebrew grammar. I would also like to thank my Modern Hebrew-speaking friends Tali, who I met in Sacramento, and Talya, who I met in Tucson, who have spoken Hebrew with me and allowed me to ask about finer points of Modern Hebrew grammar and bounce my ideas about the language off them. Many thanks go to my friend Zoe Kosoff. We encouraged each other to stay on track with our thesis writing, meeting at the library and Caffé Luce to work on our respective theses 3 for as long as we could stand it during the day. I am also grateful for our crazy adventures at various conferences and when it came time to take a break, and I will miss her company when she goes off to Jordan next year. I could not have done the statistics required to analyze my data without the help of my friend Renee, who has been my friend since the “good old days” in my first master’s program in linguistics at UC Davis. (All errors of implementation and interpretation are, of course, my own). She and Brian have supported me and supplied me with good wine, which is always a welcome occurrence. Special thanks go out to my parents, Neal and Melanie, and my aunt Melinda as well, who host me in Casa Grande whenever they are down being snowbirds from Lake Tahoe. I would not be where I am without the support of my parents, both financially and emotionally, and I thank them for encouraging me to do academically what made me happy and most interested me. I thank my brother and sister as well, for their encouragement. I would also like to thank my supervisor at the Bureau of Reclamation, Lisa Lewis, for allowing me to take a few days off here and there to finish up this thesis. She has always encouraged me both at work and in my personal and academic lives, and I am grateful for her support. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Mike (and the cats too) for being there when I needed moral support. 4 DEDICATION In memory of my mother Charlene J. Jones 1958 - 1998 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables……………………………………………………………………………………...8 List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………..9 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..10 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………11 1.2 A Note on Modern Hebrew Phonology and Morphology…………………………...19 2. Background……………………………………………………………………………………25 2.2 Non-metathesizing /t/ + Sibilant Clusters……………………………………………26 2.2.1 Nouns with the Nominalizing Prefix /t-/…………………………………...27 2.2.2 Binyan Hif’il Verbs………………………………………………………...28 2.2.3 Borrowings with Affricates………………………………………………..29 2.3 Metathesis Restricted to Binyan Hitpa’el……………………………………………30 3. Literature Review……………………………………………………………………………..31 3.1 Crosslinguistic Research…………………………………………………………….31 3.2 Research on Modern Hebrew Metathesis……………………………………………66 4. Methods……………………………………………………………………………………….72 4.1 Predictions…………………………………………………………………………...72 4.2 Stimuli………………………………………………………………………………..77 4.3 Participants…………………………………………………………………………...82 4.4 Procedure…………………………………………………………………………….83 4.5 Analysis……………………………………………………………………………...85 5. Results…………………………………………………………………………………………87 5.1 Direction of Misperception and Phonotactic Frequency…………………………….93 6 6. Discussion……………………………………………………………………………………..96 6.1 Contra Hume (2004)…………………………………………………………………96 6.2 The Bigger Picture: Metathesis and Sound Change………………………………..103 7. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...107 References………………………………………………………………………………………110 7 LIST OF TABLES TABLE 1: Modern Hebrew Consonants………………………………………………………...21 TABLE 2: Modern Hebrew Binyanim…………………………………………………………...24 TABLE 3: Regular Sibilant Metatheses…………………………………………………………63 TABLE 4: Confusion Rates……………………………………………………………………...75 TABLE 5: Phonotactic Probabilities for Stop/Sibilant Sequences………………………………75 TABLE 6: Phonotactic Probabilities for Stop/Stop Sequences………………………………….77 TABLE 7: Participant Results…………………………………………………………………...88 TABLE 8: Confusion Rates……………………………………………………………………...93 TABLE 9: Phonotactic Frequencies for English………………………………………………...94 TABLE 10: Phonotactic Frequencies for Modern Hebrew……………………………………...95 8 LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: Reaction Times for Correct Responses Across Phoneme Type…………………….88 FIGURE 2: Reaction Times for Correct Responses Across Voicing……………………………89 FIGURE 3: Reaction Times by Phoneme Type and Metathesis………………………………...90 9 ABSTRACT In binyan hitpa’el, the reflexive and reciprocal verbal conjugation in Modern Hebrew, the /t/ of the /hit-/ prefix categorically metathesizes with a following sibilant (/s/, /z/, /ʃ/, or /͡ts/), giving forms like [histakel] instead of expected forms like *[hitsakel]. It has been theorized that this metathesis may be perceptual, serving to place the /-t-/ in prevocalic position where it can be better perceived by listeners, the direction of metathesis being the more common sibilant + stop sequence in Modern Hebrew (Hume 2004), or that it may be auditory, based on a tendency for the sibilant noise to decouple from the rest of the speech stream, resulting in listener confusion about the place of the sibilant within the word (Blevins & Garrett 2004). Based on data from a speech perception experiment using English speakers, who listened to masked stimuli similar to hitpa’el verbs, I argue that Blevins & Garrett (2004)’s account is correct, with English speaking listeners evincing a tendency to misperceive stop + sibilant sequences as sibilant + stop sequences, despite the higher frequency of stop + sibilant sequences in English. 10 1. Introduction Until fairly recently, linguists have often thought of metathesis, the switching of sounds within a word, as a sporadic, phonetically unnatural phenomenon, a process un-amenable to standard phonological analyses, connected with speech errors in adults and with the phonological “mistakes” that children make during language acquisition (Hume 2001; Blevins & Garrett 1998). The Neogrammarians, a group of German comparative linguists active in the 1870s, excluded it entirely from their definition of sound change, because metathesis, in their view, was neither “regular” nor “purely phonetically conditioned”; though common historically, they believed that it was due to extra-phonetic factors, like phonological mistakes on the part of speakers (Hale 2003). Later, structuralists like
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