A Semantico-Phonological Investigation of Proper Nouns

Abstract

This paper investigates the underlying aspects which would account for why some Arabic geographical names accept the addition of the definite "?al" to their beginnings and why some don’t accept such an addition. The study depends on the data taken from “"Atlas of Jordan and World, 2003"”. This research is only oriented to the monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The researchers cited some pieces of evidence validating that this addition is mainly correlated with two aspects: the place of articulation of each segment comprising the whole word and the semantic content of the whole word. The study concludes that whether accepting the definite article or not is not haphazard, but, to the contrary, it is quite subjected to specific semantic procedures and certain segmental paradigms.