Prosodic Constraints on Reduplication in Saudi Arabic: A Typological and Theoretical Investigation

This study investigates the prosodic mechanisms that shape reduplication in Saudi Arabic, a phenomenon that remains underexplored within Arabic dialectology despite its theoretical significance for prosodic morphology. While prior research has established that reduplication across languages often obeys weight- or foot-based constraints, little is known about how such prosodic structures operate in Saudi Arabic. Adopting an Optimality Theory (OT) framework, this study examines whether Saudi Arabic reduplication conforms primarily to bimoraic or metrical-foot-based restrictions and how these constraints interact with syllable weight. A corpus of 538 tokens, complemented by elicited speech data and real-time perception experiments, was analyzed to assess both production and processing patterns. Results indicate that reduplication overwhelmingly conforms to bimoraic constraints (82.3%), with metrical-foot alignment exerting a secondary influence (14.7%). Light syllables undergo modification significantly more often than heavy ones (χ²(2, N = 538) = 96.4, p < .001), suggesting weight-sensitive constraint ranking. Perception data further demonstrate that listeners process bimoraic, stress-aligned reduplicants more efficiently than forms that violate these constraints, confirming the cognitive reality of the hierarchy. The findings refine existing models of prosodic morphology by linking grammatical and processing evidence and position Saudi Arabic as a typologically strict system within Semitic phonology. Implications extend to theoretical linguistics and computational modeling of prosodic patterns in morphophonology.