A moraic approach to syllables: Evidence from Moroccan Arabic

The mora, a phonological constituent between the segment and the syllable, is the terminal element in the prosodic hierarchy. It is a unit of phonological weight that measures syllablesʹ heaviness or lightness; taking into consideration extraprosodicity, a bimoraic syllable is heavy whereas a monomoraic syllable is light. The present study shows the importance of adopting a moraic approach to the syllable to explain phenomena in prosodic phonology. Specifically, it demonstrates that an analysis in which syllables consist of moras can clarify four previously problematic areas in the phonology of Moroccan Arabic: the invariably long character of lexical vowels, the thorny issue of stress, the lengthening of vowels in some contexts, and their shortening in others. We argue that the adoption of the mora as a syllabic constituent leads to simple and explanatorily adequate analyses of prosodic phenomena in Moroccan Arabic.