of Stress in Cairene Arabic

With its variation in stress across dialects, Arabic has been very visible in the literature on stress. In particular, the Cairene variety has been subject to much discussion. This is partly due to the fact that it is a well-known and well-documented dialect, but also due to a corpus of data published by Mitchell in 1960. These data, which actually deal with Egyptian pronunciation of neo-Classical Arabic, were interesting because of the complex, but entirely predictable stress pattern they exhibited which: 1. was sensitive to three degrees of syllable weight: light, heavy, and superheavy; and 2. entailed a curiously long-range correlation between a word’s (primary) stress, which was always near the word’s right edge, and, in the absence of intervening heavy syllables, whether there was an even or odd number of syllables from the word’s left edge. These data have formed the basis of many subsequent metrical analyses, such as Hayes (1995) and Kenstowicz (1994). The aim of this paper is to reanalyze the facts of stress of Cairene Arabic within