• DOI:10.1515/jall.1985.7.2.105
• Corpus ID: 29304770

Syllabic Consonants and Syllabification in Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber

@inproceedings{Dell1985SyllabicCA,
  title={Syllabic Consonants and Syllabification in Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber},
  author={François Dell and Mohamed Elmedlaoui},
  year={1985}
}

• F. Dell, Mohamed Elmedlaoui
• Published 1985
• Linguistics

This article deals with the Tashlhiyt dialect of Berber äs spoken in the Imdlawn valley, seventy kilometers northeast of the city of Taroudant, in the Western Higher Atlas. One of us (ME) is a native Speaker of that dialect, which will henceforth be referred to äs ITB. A more detailed treatment of some of the points discussed here will be found in Elmedlaoui(1985). ITB has syllabic consonants (sonorants and obstruents), and the eligibility of a segment for being a syllabic peak depends on its position in the sonority hierarchy (sections 2 and 3). Before a pause two syllables may be fused into one (section 4). Long segments behave äs asymmetrical sequences of two units (section 5). The regularities discussed in this article are independent of grammatical categories or of the morphological make up of words. They are exceptionless, äs far äs we know. ITB has three vowels a, i and w, and the semivowels y and w. We shall call the segments i, yy u, and w high vocoids (henceforth HV). i and y are in complementary distribution in the phonetic representations, and so are u and w: if a HV is adjacent to a syllabic segment it must be a semivowel, otherwise it must be a vowel. For instance the 3m. sg. prefix shows up äs y when the following segment is syllabic, and äs / otherwise (cf. (1)), and the 2 pl. pronoun is pronounced un when the preposition which governs it ends in a nonsyllabic segment, and wn if that preposition ends in a syllabic segment (cf. (2)):