Broken Plural in Jordanian Arabic: Constraint-Based Evidence From Loanwords Adaptation

Based on a critical review of previous work, this paper shows that prosodic phonology models do not account for all broken plurals in Arabic especially in the case of singular forms comprising two or more different plurals, and in the dialectal variations of selecting the optimal plural pattern.As evidenced in loanword adaptation in Bedouin Jordanian Arabic, this paper proposes a well-defined set of prosodically-based constraints that account for cases of a single template generating two optimal outputs with different meanings creating lexical ambiguity, and cases of a single template generating multiple optimal outputs creating cases of free variation (multiple grammar/free ranking) in the same dialect and within different regional varieties.