Firthian Prosodic Appr oach:Evidence From Arabic

Preoccupation with the narrow segmentalism of phonemics has entailed the ignoring of many regularities extending beyond the domain of the phoneme. Firthian prosodic analysis rejects this purely segmental, ‘linear’, phonemic analysis, and assigns phonological features to prosodies which are non-segmental entities that can be tied to any level or aspect of phonology – spread over a whole word, or root, or syntactic unit, or syllable, or a part of a syllable, for example. This paper, it is hoped, will demonstrate the value of prosodic analysis, particularly as applied to Arabic, since it is able to capture phenomena that traditional structural phonemic analysis fails to bring out