The Stress System of Casablanca Moroccan Arabic(suite)

3. ESTABLISHING AN EMPIRICAL BASIS FOR STRESS IN CASABLANCA MOROCCAN ARABIC
This section is intended to lay down the background for the analysis of stress presented within the OT framework in section 4 below. It is divided into two major subsections. In the first subsection, a quantitative test is undertaken and a corpus of 39 items is presented to a group of 60 subjects who were asked to place stress on the syllable they perceive as prominent. In the second subsection, the recordings of 5 selected subjects out of the 60 subjects who participated in the quantitative test, were subjected to a laboratory analysis to measure fundamental frequency, intensity and duration.
3.1 The Quantitative Test
The idea of establishing a quantitative analysis of stress is inspired from a similar work undertaken by Benhallam (1990b) whose objective is to quantify the intuitions of native speakers of MA about the placement of stress. The objective of the test undertaken here is to try to set the basis for an instrumental study and see whether or not such a study would match up the intuitions of the native speaker of CMA.
3.1.1 The Hypothesis
Following Benhallam (1990b), we will assume that the working hypothesis in the present work is that stress is placed on the penultimate syllable. Such a hypothesis is to a large extent confirmed by most of the works undertaken on MA stress. Thus our objective in the present research will be to consider why words with final or antepenultimate stress, if there are any, do not receive penultimate stress.
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3.1.2 The Questionnaire
The questionnaire consists of two parts: general information about the subjects, and the test items 4. In the first part, the subjects were asked to respond to the following:
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a. First name:
b. Last name:
c. Sex: