The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic (review)

The word ‘Arabic’, like ‘Chinese’, refers to a group of genetically related language varieties that may not be mutually intelligible. It subsumes the classical tongue, its direct descendant modern standard or literary Arabic, and the many so-called dialects, often not mutually intelligible, that are spoken throughout the Arab world. The ‘Arabic’ of this book’s title refers not to this huge diversity, an impossible task, but rather to two colloquial varieties, one from Cairo and the other from San’ a, Yemen. (The author has resided for extended periods in both cities.)

Of these two dialects, San’ani is much less familiar to Arabists and especially phonologists. Thus, this work’s greatest contribution is its careful and systematic presentation of San’ani’s many interesting phonological properties, several of which are mentioned below.

There are ten chapters. An introduction (Ch. 1) provides a brief overview of the Semitic family and of the history of Arabic. Ch. 2 is a historically based description of the phonemic system, closely following Fischer and Jastrow (1980:49–60). Ch. 3 lays out the author’s assumptions about distinctive features and feature geometry, providing (though not really justifying) underspecified feature matrices for Cairene and San’ani.

The next two chapters deal with prosodic phonology: syllabification (Ch. 4) and stress (Ch. 5). Cairene syllable structure and stress have received a great deal of attention previously (e.g. Broselow 1976, 1979, Hayes 1995, Kenstowicz 1980, McCarthy 1979, Selkirk 1981), so it is difficult to find much new to say. The more interesting material therefore comes from the San’ani dialect. Unusually for Arabic, San’ani has final triconsonantal clusters, always ending in [t∫]: [maːgult∫] ‘I/you.m.sg didn’t say’. Watson makes a good case that the [t∫] sequence is actually a monosegmental affricate even though it is created by morpheme concatenation. San’ani stress is remarkably complex: stress is assigned to (a) the rightmost nonfinal syllable with a long vowel or a geminate consonant ([h^׀aːkaðahaː] ‘like this’, [mit?^׀axxiraːt] ‘late.f.pl’), otherwise to (b) a final superheavy syllable ([ban^׀aːt] ‘girls’), otherwise to (c) the rightmost closed syllable in the penult or antepenult ([m^׀adrasih] ‘school’), otherwise to (d) the leftmost light syllable ([makt^׀abatiː] ‘my library’, [r^׀agabatih] ‘his neck’). Not unexpectedly, the analysis proposed is complex as well, involving left-to-right trochees and foot extrametricality to account for (d), a difference in how final consonants are licensed in CVVC and CVCC syllables to account for (a) vs. (b), and two moraic layers (as in Hayes 1995) with the stipulation that ‘footing is enforced on the upper moraic layer if and only if there are underlyingly bimoraic syllables in a word’ (104) to get the difference between (a) and (c).

Chs. 6 and 7 treat nonconcatenative and concatenative morphology, respectively. These chapters could be quite useful to non-Arabists looking for a clear synopsis of how Arabic words are put together. Ch. 8 deals with lexical phonology in two sections, one on prosodic phonology and the other on segmental phonology. Ch. 9 treats postlexical phonology and is organized similarly. Since nothing in the analysis really hinges on the lexical/postlexical distinction or other premises of the theory of lexical phonology, it might have made more sense to unite the sections on prosodic phonology with the material on syllabification in Ch. 4. There is a solid consensus among phonologists of diverse theoretical persuasions that many phonological processes are intimately connected with conditions on syllabic well-formedness. The author clearly shares in this consensus, since Chs. 8 and 9 are salted with cross-references back to Ch. 4.

Chs. 9 and 10, the latter dealing with emphasis (pharyngealization), contain some interesting discussion of San’ani segmental phonology. Unusually for Arabic, San’ani has devoicing of geminate stops and intervocalic voicing of singleton stops. The emphatic consonants [s^ʕ], [t^ʕ], and [ð^ʕ] are...