Egyptian Arabic Broken Plurals in DATR

This paper examines plural inflectional processes in Egyptian Arabic, with specific focus on the complex broken plural system. The data used in this examination is a set of 114 lexemes from a dictionary of the Egyptian Arabic variety by Badawi & Hinds (1986) collected through comparison of singular to plural template correspondences proposed by Gadalla (2000). The theoretical side of this analysis builds upon Alain Kihm’s realizational “Root-and-Site Hypothesis”, which categorizes concatenative and non-concatenative morphological processes as approachable in the same manner when discussing inflection as not only represented in segments but also as “sites” where inflectional operations may take place (Kihm 2006: 69). To organize the data through a computational lens, I emulate Kihm’s approach in DATR, a lexical knowledge representation language, to generate the grammatical forms for a set of both broken and regular plural nouns. The hierarchically-structured inheritance of DATR allows for default templates to be defined and overridden, permitting a wide scope of variation to be represented with little code content. Overall, the analysis reveals that complex morphological phenomena, such as the broken plural, can be accounted for through a combination of theoretical and computational approaches.