OrBinah

Gemination and Spirantization in Hebrew, Berber and Tigrinya

Mohamed Elmedlaoui 1993

An a posteriori epilogue (January 2017)

This article deals with stop/spirant alternation in some Afro-Asiatic languages, mainly Hebrew, Tigrinya and many Berber dialects. I was written and published in a time (late 80s and early 90s of the 20^th c.) when this issue was among the topical issues of the segmental phonology theory about representations and rules vs. constraints. The analysis it proposes departs from the confronting sub theories of the time concerning the issue. By the time, it seems that the insights this analysis introduced were likely to permit an extension of Optimality Theory from just prosodic phonology to segmental phonology.

The article was published as Elmedlaoui 1993 in a Moroccan linguistic review. But the printed text was full of typos. Somme manually corrected offprint have circulated and referred to later in the linguistic literature dealing with the subject. The reference of the published article is the following.

Elmedlaoui, M. (1993) "Gemination and Spirantization in Hebrew, Berber and Tigrinya: a ‘Fortis-Lenis’ Module Analysis", Linguistica Communicatio, vol. 5, numéros 1 et 2: 1993 pp. 121-176.

This is now the link for an online PDF copy of the article:

https://static.blog4ever.com/2006/04/162080/GEMINATE.doc.pdf

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Mohamed Elmedlaoui

https://static.blog4ever.com/2006/04/162080/Elmedlaoui-CV-Publications_4840497.pdf