Soumia El Yamani

Stress Assignment: an Optimality Theoretic Approach Soumia El Yamani

Stress in Moroccan Arabic, and also in other languages, poses challenging problems for phonological theory. This is due to the fact that stress exhibits conflicting properties; which makes it difficult to provide answers to a number of issues. This book provides an investigation into a prominent aspect of prosodic phonology in Moroccan Arabic (a case study of the dialect of Rabat city), namely, stress assignment in the grammatical category of verbs within the framework of optimality theory as proposed in Prince and Smolensky and McCarthy and Prince. It particularly addresses a range of issues such as: the position of stress, the basis on which stress is located, the factors on the basis of which stress location is effected, the importance of the perceptual and the instrumental tests in shedding light on stress assignment, and the extent to which the optimality theoretic analysis confirm or disconfirm the results of the perceptual and the instrumental tests concerning stress placement. This book will be of interest to linguistics, teachers, researchers and to anyone interested in language study and phonological theory.