Phonological Assimilation in Urban Jordanian Arabic

This study reports patterns of phonological assimilation in consonant clusters in Urban Jordanian Arabic (UJA). We examine all possible C1C2 combinations across a word boundary as well as the concatenations of consonant-final prefixes //in/ and //il/ and consonant-initial stems. The data show that place assimilation in UJA is regressive, and it can occur both across major articulators and within the same articulator (for coronals). UJA also exhibits voicing assimilation and emphasis assimilation. The main theoretical interest of the work lies in the observation that phonological assimilation in UJA is sometimes conditioned by the similarity between the two adjacent consonants. This is reflected in three patterns of assimilation. First, coronal consonants with a minor place difference (e.g., alveolar vs. palatoalveolar) may assimilate to each other only if the sonorancy of the consonants already matches. Second, coronal obstruents may undergo place assimilation when followed by a coronal obstruent, but not a velar obstruent. Third, voicing and emphasis assimilations occur only if the places of the adjacent consonants are identical underlyingly or as a result of place assimilation. These results are discussed briefly in the light of recent works by MacEachern (1999), Hansson (2001), Zuraw (2002), Rose and Walker (2004), and Steriade (to appear). The UJA place assimilation patterns are also compared to the implicational hierarchies established by Mohanan (1993)’s and Jun (1995)’s crosslinguistic typologies.