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

Abstract

This thesis is an analytical study of phonology, which examines the qualitysensitive stress of 51 selected transliterated Islamic terminologies. Ezzat (2010) explains that the Islamic words nowadays have a great impact in the world since 9/11, as people across the whole world started to read about the Islamic religion. Consequently, most of the Islamic terms are borrowed from its original Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) into English, such as the following borrowed transliterated Islamic terminologies: Minbar which means (pulpit) (Adamec, 2009, p. 253), Fitrah which means (innate goodness and purity) (Oliver & Steinberg, 2005, pp. 135, 204), and ʼUmmah which means (community) (Burke, 2015, p. 33). As the transliterated Islamic terms were copied into the English language, some of it resisted the phonological stress of English and preserved its own MSA stress. However, some non-native speakers of Arabic language pronounce Arabic words incorrectly by stressing its wrong syllables. Hence, the goal of this thesis is intended to show the exact articulation of Modern Standard Arabic by testing the most sonorous vowel of the transliterated Islamic terminology to decide its most optimal stress as ̏ vowel quality plays a role in determining the location of stress˝ (McCarthy, 2004, p. 191