Modeling Palestinian Retracted Tongue Root (RTR) Harmony into Optimality Theory

Palestinian Arabic emphatic sounds/ T, D, S/ produced with the back of the tongue retracted (RTR) have emphatic influence spreading over consonants and vowels and thus causing harmony between the emphatic sounds and the vowels and consonants of the word. However, this spreading is not uniform. For example, it spreads either to the right, or to the left, and sometimes it is blocked. This paper unfolds the constraints at work that yield the outcome forms after the emphasis is at play in the word. Moreover, this paper ranks the constraints and models them using the terms of Optimality Theory. Besides dealing with the emphatic sounds/ T, D, S/, the paper proves that the sound/r/ has two varieties in Northern Gaza dialect: emphatic /R/ and non- emphatic/r/. Like other emphatics, the influence of the emphatic /R/ may spread both ways: right and left, or it can be blocked by some constraints. These constraints include neighboring coronals in addition to high front vowels. The high front vowel /ii/ in this context functions either as a segment or as a morpheme indicating possessive “my”. In the former case the emphatic influence spreads, whereas in the later it does not, thus allowing phonology to outrank morphology.