NonFinality drives epenthesis in the Moroccan Arabic broken plural

Abstract We show that in Moroccan Arabic, the iambic broken plural (C. CVC ) is augmented to (C. CV ). CV with a final vowel, focusing on the (C.Cu).Ca pattern, e.g., old [k.tub] ‘books’ new [k.tu.ba] ‘books’. We argue that the added final vowel serves to prevent a final footed syllable (prevent a violation of NonFinality ). This instance of prosodically-driven epenthesis fills a typological gap where such patterns were claimed to be unattested (Blumenfeld 2006, Moore-Cantwell 2016) and supports similar proposals about German plurals where NonFinality is argued to drive epenthesis (Golston & Wiese 1995, Wiese 2009). We show that NonFinality is active more broadly in the Moroccan Arabic plural system, e.g., capturing the increase in use of C.Ca.Ci in the lexicon. Our conclusions are based on a corpus and a survey of Moroccan plurals that we analyze with lexically-indexed violable constraints (Moore-Cantwell & Pater 2016).