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Some Grammatical Functions of Prominence in Arabic12

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Y. A. El-Haleese
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Extract

Linguists who are interested in Arabic are familiar with the fact that in spoken Arabic certain syllables stand out to the ear more than others; these syllables have been variously referred to as stressed or prominent syllables. The phenomenon of prominence has been treated by a number of linguists who have regarded it mainly as a characteristic of the word. But it has to be viewed as a characteristic of the one-word piece or pieces of a more complex structure with more than one prominent syllable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , February 1976 , pp. 83 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1976

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References

3 See particularly Mitchell, T. F., ‘Prominence and syllabication in Arabic’, BSOAS, XXIII, 2, 1960, 369–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abdo, D. A., On stress and Arabic phonology, Beirut, 1969.Google Scholar

4 For the meaning of the linguistic term ‘piece’, see Carnochan, J., ‘Categories of the verbal piece in Bachama’, African Language Studies, xi, 1970, 81–112.Google Scholar

5 The IPA phonetic symbols are adopted in this paper. Symbols for emphatic sounds are indicated by subscript dote.

6 See Halliday, M. A. K., A course in spoken English intonation, London, 1970, 3–4.Google Scholar

7 Tonic syllable will be underlined.

8 Transitive sentences can be described as involving a subject-object relationship. See Lyons, J., Introduction to theoretical linguistics, Cambridge, 1968, 350–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a detailed study of the category of transitivity in grammar.

9 Symbols with subscript dots stand for emphatic sounds, /mufaxxam/.

10 The /i/ vowel at the beginning of these nouns is a helping (anaptyetic) vowel, whose function is to prevent the occurrence of three consonants in succession.

11 This class is similar to that of English which Lyons, (Introduction to theoretical linguistics, 359)Google Scholar labelled as ergative since they ‘occur in both intransitive and transitive sentences, and that the two-place, transitive construction is derivable from the one place, intransitive construetion by means of a causative operation which has the effect of introducing an “agentive” subject’. For instance the two-place sentence /lwalad ‘fatah il'ba:b/ ‘the boy opened the door’ is derivable from the one-place sentence /fatah il'ba:b/ ‘the door opened’.

12 Adjectives in Arabic agree with their nouns in number and gender.

13 In some dialects of Arabic it is pronounced as /?uṃṃ/ and in others, specially the urban dialects, as /?imm/.