The Phonology of Stress in Moroccan Arabic Clitics: Constraint Indexation and Inconsistency Resolution

The present study attempts to formally account for stress non-uniformity attested in clitics in Moroccan Arabic (MA). Similar to Semitic languages, stress assignment in MA observes certain phonological inconsistencies. Stress in MA falls on the final syllable if it is heavy; otherwise, on the penultimate (Boudlal, 2001). Nevertheless, the cliticised items limit the scope of this generalization in spite of ending up in heavy syllables. To handle this lexical idiosyncrasy, the analysis proposed in this study is distinguished from previous analyses in applying a relatively new Optimality Theory (OT) analysis in terms of lexically-indexed constraints (Pater, 2000) in which both faithfulness and markedness constraints must be appropriately indexed. We first show how a standard OT analysis cannot provide a unified analysis of stress in MA. Second, we posit lexically-conditioned versions of NONFIN (NONFIN-�) and IAMB (IAMB-�) and apply them only to the lexical items indexed for their application. This allowed a unified account for the optimality of both regular patterns and exceptional patterns.