Stress and Syncope in Tobruq Arabic an Eastern Libyan Dialect: A Stratal OT Account

This dissertation studies in detail a number of phonological aspects accounted for through a Stratal OT analysis, in Tobruq Libyan Arabic (TLA), which is a variety that belongs to the set of dialects that are referred to collectively as Eastern Libyan Arabic. As will transpire from this work, TLA differs from Benghazi Arabic, which is always taken to be a representative dialect of Eastern Libyan Arabic. The study particularly engages in the investigation of the phonology-morphology interface, whose conflicting interactions function as triggers of a number of phonological processes in TLA. Central to our focus will be syllable-structure formations and resyllabifications, stress patterns and their assignment, as well as vowel syncope and the contrasting behaviour of epenthetic vowel insertion. The former processes are shown to be affected by two morphological factors: the type of word class, and the type of morphological ending that attaches to a monomorphemic word. It will also emerge from this study how (inflectional and derivational) allomorphy is very much conditioned by phonology, yet not only in terms of the usual vowel- vs. consonant-initial effects, but also in terms of the stem-form’s syllable-structure type and the number of syllables, as well as the number of consonant radicals within the stem. The work on syncope in this study will reveal yet another property which makes the TLA dialect distinct from the typical characterisation of Eastern Libyan Arabic based on the Benghazi dialect. It will be shown that TLA is a non-differential dialect where both high and low vowels are subject to deletion resulting in effects on the syllable structure, stress assignment, and vowel quality. On the basis of the Stratal OT analysis that is motivated throughout this dissertation, given its effective handling of a number of morphophonological phenomena, through a constraint-based analysis, it is shown how at the stem level, syncope causes onset complexity and low vowel raising, while contrastively, at the word level, no vowel deletion is applied, except the application of other processes such as epenthesis, vowel lengthening, and stress shifting.