Emphasis spread in Arabic: evidence from Urban Jordanian Arabic

This study examines emphasis spread (ES) in Urban Jordanian Arabic (UJA), focusing on the phonological and phonetic mechanisms that govern its direction and domain. Emphasis, realized through tongue root retraction, affects both consonants and vowels and can propagate bidirectionally within the phonological word. Using autosegmental phonology, feature geometry, and Optimality Theory (OT), this research identifies coronal emphatics (/tˤ, dˤ, sˤ, ðˤ/) and the low back vowel /ɑ/ as primary triggers of ES. Moreover, the OT analyses reveal that alignment constraints (L-ALIGN, R-ALIGN V-[dor]) interact with faithfulness constraints (MAXLINK, NOGAP, DEPLINK) to shape the extent and direction of spread. The study provides a unified formal account of intra- and inter-word ES and highlights cross-dialectal variability in Arabic, offering new insights into the phonological representation of emphatic segments. These findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the structural behavior of emphatics in Arabic and support the refinement of theoretical models dealing with feature spreading and secondary articulation. The implications extend to comparative dialectology, phonological theory, and the development of more precise feature-based representations across Semitic languages.