Prosodic domains of syllabification in Sudanese Arabic.

Abstract

This paper proposes a prosodic account of syncope and of epenthesis and consonant deletion, which function as strategies for repairing unsyllabified segments, in three dialects of Sudanese Arabic. The analysis identifies the precise prosodic domains of syllabification in these dialects and shows how these domains interact with the phenomena discussed. On the one hand, the dialects diverge significantly with respect to the prosodic levels at which unsyllabified segments are repaired; this divergence is shown to follow from the degree of restriction each dialect places on word-level syllabification. On the other hand, the dialects exhibit fairly similar patterns with respect to the phrasal domains of syncope; this similarity is shown to be a reflex of the degree of restriction on the phrasal domains of resyllabification.