Abstract

The present study targets interdisciplinary linguistic effects of morpho-lexical dynamic impacts on phonological processes. Therefore, it succinctly investigates some specific aspects pertaining to two Arabic dialects, namely, Modern Standard Arabic and Suburbanite Northern Jordanian Arabic. The narrow scope of this paper is deliberately confined to fathoming the role of the nominative morpheme marker in the syllable interaction at the word boundary when such a morpheme is in effect. Because both of these dialects abide by the universal ONS-constraint, the deformity of onsetless syllables are sought to be systematically repaired with the least serious constraint violation. On the one hand, the vowel in the syncopated nominative morpheme intervenes in the former, so no epenthesis occurs; on the other hand, the latter employs epenthesis to fix such a problem. This may give deeper insight into answering the question behind MacCarthy’s (2007) assumption of the hidden generalizations that rationalize optimal variations in spoken varieties in the Levant. In addition, the researcher believes that the data and the analyses presented in this paper can catalyze curiosity of some researchers to conduct many other relevant works in more depth not only to better explore such a rich interface but also to steer such an analysis towards neurological approaches that advocate parallel distributed processing in an attempt to further attest language acquisition premises in this regard.

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