Syllable Lightening in the Perfective of Moroccan Arabic Hollow Verbs

Abstract

The paper provides a prosodic analysis of syllable lightening in the perfective of Moroccan Arabic (MA) hollow verbs. Previous works on MA verb inflectional morphology are limited in the sense that they failed to integrate the issue of syllable lightening in the perfective aspect. Drawing on secondary data from MA grammar works, we demonstrate that heavy syllables are lightened due to the prosodic constraints RHYTHMIC CONTOUR (RH-CONT) and *ΣH which militate against Heavy Light (HL) and Heavy (H) feet. This finding lends support to the role of foot patterns in the analysis of syllable de-weighting and enhances our understanding of the phonology of MA hollow verbs.