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Emphasis harmony in a Modern Aramaic dialect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Robert D. Hoberman
Robert D. Hoberman*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Stony Brook
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Abstract

In the modern Aramaic dialect of the Jews of Azerbaijan, emphasis (pharyngealization) behaves much like vowel harmony, though it affects consonants and vowels alike. An autosegmental analysis of its distribution shows that emphatic spans are underlyingly marked as such, whereas plain spans must have no initial specification as to emphasis, and are eventually pronounced as non-emphatic by default. In mixed words, which are part plain and part emphatic, emphasis is underlyingly associated with a particular syllable; but in words which are emphatic throughout, the underlying mark of emphasis is floating—not associated with any particular segmental position.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

* I am grateful to Mark Aronoff, Ellen Broselow, and Robert Vago for extensive and very helpful discussions of this material. A briefer version of this paper was presented at the Parasession on Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology of the Chicago Linguistic Society in April 1987; it is to appear in the volume of papers from that session, edited by Anna Bosch et al.

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