This paper explores whether a phase-based approach to the syntax-phonology interface can account for the prosodic phrasing facts of Egyptian Arabic (EA). Novel speech data from a corpus of syntactically complex and prosodically heavy VOO read speech sentences is examined for evidence to disambiguate between the predictions of edge-based and phase-based conceptions of the syntax-phonology interface. The evidence proves to be finely balanced, but shows (1) that whatever the mapping it must result in a distinct level of phonological representation, to account for observed prosodic minimality effects, and (2) that the detail of the phonetic implementation indicates that this intervening prosodic representation has recursive structure. We conclude by suggesting that in EA this structure may consist of fewer levels of phrasing than proposed even in recent, universally restricted, conceptions of the Prosodic Hierarchy.