![]() The second motivation comes from the fact that CMA is not a well studied language. The first motivation is to see how clusters in CMA are concatenated. There are two main motivations for the choice of the topic (CMA consonant Phonotactics). I am going to look at the possible and impossible clusters w-initially and w-finally (i.e. Hence, vowel phonotactics will not be dealt with in this research. I am going to limit myself to the analysis of consonant phonotactics. This thesis is mainly concerned with the consonant phonotactics of Casablanca Moroccan Arabic (henceforth CMA). This is formally captured with the alignment constraint ALIGNLEFT( Stop,σ), which is derived from the more general family member, ALIGN-LEFT(C,σ), a general alignment constraint that is assumed to cover Coda Condition cases. I present empirical, theoretical and phonetic motivations for the strong tendency of stops to align with the beginning of a syllable. I formally base this on the notion of Alignment constraints (McCarthy and Prince 1993), one of the hallmarks of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), and, more speci!cally, on the discussion regarding the coverage of ALIGN constraints in syllable theory (McCarthy and Prince 1993, Itô and Mester 1999), namely Coda Condition cases (Itô 1986, 1989). I argue that various distributional facts regarding stops can be favorably explained as an alignment relation between syllables and stops, where stops are preferred in onsets ("left-aligned" to the beginning of a syllable) rather than codas ("right-aligned" to the end of a syllable). The focus of this thesis is on the distribution of stop consonants.
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