I’m Ali Nirheche. I’m doing my PhD in linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I mainly work on the phonology/morphology interface. I focus in my work on Arabic varieties, more specifically Moroccan Arabic. I’m recently interested in the study of phonological variation and exceptionality.
Current Projects:
- Voicing and Distance-based Consonant Harmony in Moroccan Arabic: In Moroccan Arabic, a variable sibilant harmony process takes place at the lexical level. The aim of this research project is to discover if distance between the related segments and voicing of the target sound affect the speaker’s rates of harmonization. As part of this project, an experiment was conducted to test the relevance of these factors.
- Assimilation of the Definite Article l– in Moroccan Arabic: a Case of Variation and Exceptionality: The aim of this research project is (i) to propose an analysis of the morpheme specific phonological behavior -total assimilation/gemination- of the Moroccan Arabic definite article l– when forming definite nouns and (ii) to understand and account for the variable behavior of nouns beginning in the palatal fricative [?] when undergoing this process.