Resyllabification in Standard Arabic: A Constraint-Based Approach

This study provides data-driven insights and analyses on lexical and post-lexical resyllabification in Standard Arabic within the framework of Optimality Theory. More particularly, the study is devoted to examining the impact of prosthesis, voweled letters, affixation, and vowel epenthesis and shortening on resyllabification processes within words and across word boundaries. Results show that Standard Arabic typically makes use of prothesized non-phonemic segments, voweled letters and epenthesis to avoid inadmissible clusters. Findings also reveal that in certain cases this variety shortens long vowels to avoid lexical and post-lexical trimoraic syllables. Moreover, the data provided have well proven that complex codas resulting from the deletion of word-final short vowels or nunation utterance finally do not often adhere to the Sonority Sequencing Principle.