International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2021, Vol. 13, No. 3 On Lexical Phonology of Zubairi Arabic Majid Abdulatif Al-Basri Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Sciences University of Petra, Jordan E-mail: [email protected] Received: March 20, 2021 Accepted: April 27, 2021 Published: May 9, 2021 doi:10.5296/ijl.v13i3.18628 URL: https://doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v13i3.18628 Abstract As its name implies, Lexical Phonology (LP) is a two-sided discipline which is very much pervasive and of a priority for particular interest. It is basically a matter of the systematic correlation of both morphology and phonology as a preliminary to screening endless items and senses. Once postulated and covered with its linguistically theoretical frames, LP has proved attractive, useful and handful in that it turns up so often in such topics as lexical items with their phonological configurations and words with their stratum-based designs. The present paper is a painstaking scrutiny of how LP is thoroughly worked out to demarcate the lexical and phonological boundaries of Zubairi Arabic lexical items with a special reference to the linguistic behavior of affix attachments. It is no doubt a massive task – it is armed with such and such amount of systematization and provided with certain 'harmless looking terms and expressions that are frequently used. In attempt to focus on this point of interaction between phonology and morphology, the paper adopts the line of reasoning that is primarily based on a tabulated description and analysis of examples so as to serve the purposes of setting some comparisons, showing certain contrasts or governing particular rules of applications as far as Zubairi words and expressions are concerned. Among many results the paper has reached is evidently the one that the structure of Zubairi Arabic lexical items is the empirical "container" in which both phonological and morphological lines of representation are sometimes crossed very sharply or sometimes paralleled very endlessly whereby their blurriness may be relative and variable. Keywords: Lexical phonology, Zubairi Arabic, Strata, Lexicon and suffix-attachments 1. Introduction What makes most, if not all, of post-generative theories of phonology somewhat idiosyncratic, rather unique and often remarkable is that they have not undermined the basic principles and www.macrothink.org/ijl 22 International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2021, Vol. 13, No. 3 the real landmarks of Generative Phonology (GP) whose fully authoritative statement was provided by Chomsky and Halle' The Sound Pattern of English (SPE) in 1968.When being initiated from SPE Phonology, Lexical Phonology (LP), among them, attempts to "beautify" the original mother theory's picture and to re-paint it with the same colors but with a different brush by adding, modifying and even deleting some lines of its theoretical arguments. It has been proclaimed that in SPE model of phonology, the morphological dimension is often slipped away from the purely phonological rules when applied to the processes of word-formation, particularly in the realm of affixation. This is generally attributed to state of affairs that morphology has traditionally been cleft between the transformation-generative syntax and the phonological theory. Thus, the domain of morphology has lost its own identity and becomes floating and unfathomable. The model embraced by LP is to go up the curtain for morphological rules to be concatenated together with phonological ones in the majority of lexical items of a particular language or a dialect. According to some LP scholars, the phonological theory of SPE model is likely to stand as a "requiem mass" for the field of morphology and this metaphorically expresses that attempts are made on SPE theorists' part to restore, albeit survive, morphology, but they are all in vain. Morphology has proved its theoretical stance side by side with phonology to expose many exuberant patterns and underlying representations of lexical items. Being au fait with LP, morphology and phonology have rules to be applied in tandem because of their universal nature and of their outstanding status. LP, in a nutshell, is seen as a two-in-one story in that it refers not only to half of the events but to the whole events that sequentially reconstruct the lexicon of a language via morphological and phonological realities. On this basis, the present paper is intended to plumb the depths of how Zubairi Arabic (Note 1) lexicon is generally treated on LP grounds, and of what morphological/phonological parameters are worked up to tracing morpheme attachment to certain words. The paper' data sources are the Zubairi lexical items and expressions taken from Al-Hilali's malāmiħ min lahaʤāt alxalīʤ alʕarabī lahʤit alzubair (Features of Arab Gulf Dialects: The Dialect of Zubair) (1991) in addition to the researcher' efficiency and reliable intuitions as a native speaker of this dialect (Note 2). What is mostly familiar in phonological studies is that words, lexical items or expressions are phonemically transcribed and then translated in order to enable readers easily read, fully understand and entirely indulge into the paper content. 2. The Morphology-Phonology Integration As stated above, lexicon is that field which seems the very essence of interacting morphological rules with phonological ones. Since lexicon has a very much recognizable status in both derivational and inflectional morphology, it gives way to particular phonological applications (e.g. Tri-syllabic Shorting rule or suffixes conditioned stress shifts) to be operated in the case of attaching certain suffixes to different roots (Kiparsky, 1982a; Mohanan, 1986; Gussmann, 1988). In its narrow sense, LP is concerned with those lexical items which cannot possibly be derived unless they undergo a number of phonological rules before morphological processes are activated to lead to many alterations affecting their meanings. The lexicon is categorized www.macrothink.org/ijl 23 International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2021, Vol. 13, No. 3 sequentially into strata (levels) whereby each stratum stipulates some sort of amalgamation between morphology and phonology (Booij, 1994). To put it in a practical way, it is of great importance to view that the first stratum (known as the morphological or lexical stratum) includes a group of suffixes added to stems, while the second one (called the phonological stratum) necessitates applying all required phonological rules. In other cases, the two strata likely entail a kind of cyclic-based nature (Note 3) in which phonological rules may either be applied before or after the attachment of suffixes to roots. This option is not always inevitable for all languages or dialects (Mohanan & Mohanan, 1984). For example, in Zubairi Arabic, the phonological stratum starts manipulating first when a vowel epenthesis of an /-a-/ and /-i-/ sounds is required to separate the suffixes from their stems whose syllables are termed as being heavy and are structured as CVVC or CVCC like (ṣadr-) ' bosom', (ṣēd-) (Note 4) 'hunting', (ʃāf-) 'see' and (xaðl-) 'let down' in attempt to break consonant clusters. Next, the lexical stratum enters the scene when consonant-initial suffixes such as (-ha) 'her', (-hum) 'their m.', (-na) 'us' and (-kum) 'you m.pl.' are generally attached to these stems as shown in Table 1: Table 1. Phonological and lexical strata of certain Zubairi lexical items Input Phonological Stratum (1) Lexical Stratum (2) Output Lexical Items Stems Vowel Epenthesis Suffix Attachments ṣadr- -a- -ha ṣadr-a-ha 'her bosom' ṣēd- -i- -hum ṣēd-i-hum 'their hunting ʃāf- -i- -na ʃāf-i-na 'he saw us' xaðl- -i- -kum xaðl-i-kum 'he let you down Nevertheless, there is a growing tendency on the part of epenthetic vowels (i. e. /a/ and /i/) to be vetoed in a phonological environment where the consonants become voiceless on either side depending entirely on the rapidity of speech. This, in turn, reshuffles a strata-based scene to be exceptionally one-level ordering (the lexical stratum) instead of two or double-level ordering (the phonological and lexical strata) as seen in Table 2: Table 2. One-stratum ordered analysis of Zubairi exceptional lexical items Input Roots Lexical Stratum Output Lexical Items Suffix Attachments bēt- -hum bēt-hum 'their house' limt- -kum limt-kum 'I blamed you m. pl.' ḍirs- -ha ḍirs-ha 'her tooth' In fact, it has been pointed out that LP is sometimes the model whose detailed frames are to carry out the mission of constraining analyses without distorting and marginalizing the basic principles on the one hand and without making a formidable change in major applications on www.macrothink.org/ijl 24 International Journal of Linguistics ISSN 1948-5425 2021, Vol. 13, No. 3 the other hand. Accordingly, PL theorists have scarcely ever been hesitant to receive the idea of one-stratum-ordering morphology with welcome when some restrictions are imposed on applying PL rules to some exceptional lexical data (Carr, 1993). It is worth-stating that the postulation of PL rules and their applications to phonological and lexical strata are not only of a cyclic standard, but they are also manifested as having the nature of non-cyclicality (Halle & Mohanan, 1985; Booij & Rubach 1987; McMahon 1990; Borowsky; 1993). That is to say, it is the inflectional suffixes not the derivational ones which are here subsumed under the lexical stratum and which are to be attached to stems before the phonological stratum embodied by any phonological operations is adopted. In a word, that morphology and phonology are very much interacted in applying rules to lexicon in general heralds the beginning of change that has paved the way for LP to step towards providing "renewed lights" at the end of phonological theory's tunnel. 3. Method By its very nature, LP is set forth to coincide perfectly the phonological context of lexical items with the morphological one.