Whamit!

Abstract: We present new evidence supporting the cycle as a grammatical mechanism in phonology. The evidence comes from the distribution of stress and vowel length in Nazarene Arabic, an understudied variety of Palestinian Arabic spoken in Nazareth. We show that the Nazarene Arabic pattern can be accounted for by cyclic versions of both rule-based phonology and Optimality Theory. The same pattern poses a challenge to Base-Derivative Correspondence – an alternative mechanism within Optimality Theory, according to which cyclic effects result from transderivational constraints that enforce similarity between related surface forms. We show that Base-Derivative Correspondence cannot account for the data, because the cyclic application of processes in Nazarene Arabic decreases rather than increases similarity between surface forms. Overall, this study highlights a divergent prediction of the cycle and Base-Derivative Correspondence, suggesting that phonological theory should include the former mechanism.