Stress in a Jordanian Arabic Dialect: The Interaction of PARSE, LAPSE, and NONFINALITY Within Optimality Theory

This paper investigates assignment of stress in an Arabic dialect spoken in Jordan (JA). Data with words made up of one to five syllables is gathered from different sources in the literature with stress assigned. For a proper account of stress in JA, the discussion will show that in words with more than one heavy syllable, it is essential for a PARSE constraint to make reference to super-heavy syllables, and a different PARSE constraint to refer to all other syllables. These two constraints are ranked with a NONFINALITY constraint in between. The discussion will also show that JA allows two adjacent unparsed syllables at the left peripheral of a word but not at the right peripheral. Accordingly, we propose two LAPSE constraints; one refers to the right edge and the other to the left edge of a word.