Masters Thesis

An optimality theoretic analysis of stress in ghamdi arabic

Word stress in Ghamdi Arabic has never previously been studied in theexisting literature on phonology. Thus, this thesis examines the word stress patterns and the syllable structures in Ghamdi Arabic. Moreover, this study presents an optimalitytheoretic framework analysis to analyze word stress (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). Every prosodic word of Ghamdi Arabic has only one primary stress, and syllable weight plays a major role in the placement of this stress. As the data show, stress falls on the rightmost heavy syllable or initial syllable if there are no heavy syllable. The paper shows the set of constraints the interactions between them, and the relative ranking of this constraints.

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