Pseudometathesis in three Standard Arabic broken-plural templates

This paper suggests that what McCarthy and Prince (1990) , following Levy (1971) , call consonant-vowel metathesis in three Standard Arabic broken-plural templates is more likely a two-step diachronic process of pseudometathesis in the sense of Blevins and Garrett (1998) . This process is characterized by vowel deletion followed by vowel insertion. Evidence from present-day dialects, mainly Lebanese Arabic and Moroccan Arabic, is used to argue that this alternative analysis is the more plausible analysis.