Skip to main content
User Image

MUFLEH SALEM M. ALQAHTANI

Professor

Professor of Theoretical Linguistics (Phonology)

College of Language Sciences
Department of Linguistics, College of Language Sciences
publication
Journal Article
2026

Harmonic Parallelism versus Harmonic Serialism: The Case of Nasal Place Assimilation in Modern Colloquial Persian

This paper elaborates on the comparison between Harmonic Parallelism (HP) and Harmonic Serialism (HS) as Optimality Theory (OT) models concerning nasal place assimilation in Modern Colloquial Persian. The data of this study were harvested from extant literature on place assimilation, including books, articles, and theses. Also, four native speakers (two males and two females) of Persian from Tehran were consulted to verify data extracted from the literature. The study concludes that place assimilation in this variety of Persian is restrictively regressive due to the impact of the coda condition when dealing with the serial application of place assimilation; hence, regressive place assimilation is executed in two steps where the first one is to delete the place feature of the coda which facilitates the leftward spread of the place feature of the following onset, as the second step; i.e., feeding order. HP encounters difficulty generalizing the place assimilation above since it is inherently derivational. Unlike HP, HS successfully expresses the serial relation beyond nasal place assimilation in Modern Colloquial Persian. Furthermore, HS can explain the directional asymmetry in place assimilation in Modern Colloquial Persian.

Publication Work Type
Manuscript
Publisher Name
Slovak Association for the Study of English (SKASE)
Publishing City
KOSICE, SLOVAKIA
Volume Number
23
Issue Number
1
Magazine \ Newspaper
SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics
Pages
2-15
more of publication
publications

This paper elaborates on the comparison between Harmonic Parallelism (HP) and Harmonic Serialism (HS) as Optimality Theory (OT) models concerning nasal place assimilation in Modern Colloquial…

by Mufleh Salem M. Alqahtani
2026
Published in:
Slovak Association for the Study of English (SKASE)
publications

This paper examines the repair strategies for adapting Arabic gutturals in Turkish such as Debuccalization, Uvular Fronting, and Guttural Deletion from an Optimality Theoretic perspective.

by Mufleh Salem M. Alqahtani
2025
Published in:
Onomázein
publications

Our investigation explored the novel findings regarding how high vowel syncope is metrically conditioned in Najdi Arabic (NA), a dialect that is spoken in the Najd province in Saudi Arabia, based…

by Mufleh Salem M. Alqahtani
2025
Published in:
De Gruyter Mouton