Examining Quality-Sensitive Stress in a Selection of Five Transliterated Islamic Terminologies: A Study in Optimality Theory

This paper is an analytical study of phonology which examines the stress of five selected transliterated Islamic terminologies. This examination will adopt the quality-sensitive stress theory of Michael Kenstowicz^[i] (1997) within the framework of optimality theory (OT)^[ii]. By applying both; quality-sensitive stress theory and the exact pronunciation of modern standard Arabic (MSA)^[iii], these five words are related to different kinds of feet; Ka‘ba and Ḥudaybiyah belong to trochaic foot, while Tawḥīd, Firdaws, and Qiblatayn are related to iambic foot. As a result, these findings suggest that MSA belong to the iambic foot type.  



       [i]He is an American phonologist who has worked throughout his career in generative phonology, and studied a wide range of different languages. When Morris Halle retired, Kenstowicz took over as professor of phonology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
(Carr, 2008, pp. 82, 101).                                                                                                                                  


       [ii]It is a transition occurred in the 1990s in the history of generative phonology. This transition was transferring the rules and constraints from SPE tradition to OT (Carr, 2008, p. 34). Its first public appearance was made in April 1991 when Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky presented a paper under the title Optimality at the University of Arizona Phonology Conference in Tucson (Archangeli & Langendoen, 1997, p. 1). OT is a constraint-based theory (de Lacy, 1997, p. 28)—each rule in OT is known as a  ̏ constraint˝ (Nathan, 2008, p. 147)—in its evaluation of output structures, in which all evaluations of different possible output forms happen simultaneously without ordering (de Lacy, 1997, p. 28). This theory was firstly applied to phonology, and then it became to be applied to phonetics, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and semantics (McCarthy, 2004, p. 3).                                                               


       [iii]It is the official language of Arabic (Uhlin, 2014) as it is the same throughout the Arab world (̏ History of Arabic Language,˝ 2014). MSA, or the fuṣḥā emerged because of its relation to the language of the Holy Qurʼan, pre-Islamic period, and early Islamic poetry. Thus, the pre-Islamic poems and later the text of the Holy Qurʼan gave MSA the prestige and authority that are necessary for its recognition as standard in society (Bassiouney & Katz, 2012, pp. 202, 203). Accordingly, MSA takes its normative rules from classical Arabic and it is regarded as the most correct, pure, idealized, and highest variety when used for religious, literary, and cultural purposes (Bagui, 2011/2012, pp. 24, 62). Hence, MSA is the modern form of classical Arabic, yet, it did not change the essentials of the classical Arabic’s syntax, but MSA had changed and still changing in its vocabulary and phraseology (Holes, 2004, p. 5).