Consonantal harmony in the holy qur'anic vocabulary : an optimality-theoretic study

الملخص EN

The study at hand explores harmony (a long-distance aspect of assimilation) as a phonological phenomenon.

it concentrates on harmony elicited in consonant segments in the Holy Qur'anic Vocabulary (HQV hence after) as an essential portion of Classical Arabic (CA).

this is because harmony process characterizes various Arabic dialects.

the current study contributes to filling a research gap by treating HQV.

the selected data of HQV are described and analysed by using optimality theory (OT) as a constraint-based framework that Prince and Smolensky (1991) proposed and was then developed by Prince and McCarthy (1993).

the major objective of the present study is to identify the phenomenon of consonantal harmony (CH) in CA rather than dialects.