Deglottalization in Jordanian Arabic: Syntax-Prosody Interface

Deglottalization occurs when a word starts with the definite article hamzatu l-waSl connective glottal stop and in some noun and verb cases. In this paper, we address deglottalization in Jordanian Arabic (JA) from the standpoint of syntax-prosody interface. We study the mapping of syntactic phrases onto phonological ones. We argue that JA marks left edges of phonological phrases in the case of deglottalization. We discuss the role of epenthesis in easing the transition between words when the first ends with a closed syllable. We also maintain that Arabic resorts to compensating the deleted syllables so as to preserve the structure of syllables before the application of the rule; the syllable produced after deglottalization has the same structure as that of the definite article before the application of deglottalization.