Medial tri-consonantal clusters in urban Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This study investigates syllable structure and syllabification patterns in Urban Jordanian Arabic. The focus falls on the case of morphologically derived medial tri-consonantal clusters. Such constructions involve the concatenation of a CVCC syllable with a -CV suffix. We argue that morphologically-derived medial tri-consonantal clusters in UJA are resolved when two consonants share a single mora through the process of adjunction-to-mora (Broselow, 1992; Broselowet al. 1995, 1997). This argument challenges Kiparsky’s (2003) typology which maintains that VC-dialects, to which the dialect of UJA belongs, deal with such clusters by means of syllable-unaffiliated moras called semisyllables lexically and by means of vowel epenthesis post-lexically. Contrary to this, we argue that CVCC syllables are bimoraic under a mora-sharing analysis which then allows -CCC- clusters to surface within CVCC.CV syllables without the need to resort to semisyllables.