A Contrastive Metrical Analysis of Main Word Stress in English and Cairene Colloquial Arabic

This book analyses Cairenes’ interlingual errors in English main word stress following Halle and Vergnaud’s (1987) metrical model and Archibald’s (1998) parameter resetting. The findings show the difficulty the research subjects had in stressing items with stress different from Cairene Colloquial Arabic (CCA) and with stress similar to CCA. The book also shows that the subjects’ correct stress patterns were due to parameter resetting, and that English stress patterns that are both different and more marked than corresponding CCA stress patterns caused learning difficulties for the subjects.