LINGUIST List 25.2964
Fri
Jul 18 2014
Diss: Arabic, Hijazi;
Phonetics, Phonology, Pragmatics: Alzaidi:
'Information Structure and Intonation in Hijazi
Arabic'
Editor for this issue:
Danuta Allen <danutalinguistlist.org>
Date: 17-Jul-2014
From: Muhammad ALZAIDI
<mohd.zaidi2007
gmail.com>
Subject: Information Structure
and Intonation in Hijazi Arabic
E-mail this message to a
friend
Institution: University of Essex
Program: MPhil/PhD in Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2014
Author: Muhammad Swaileh Alzaidi
Dissertation Title: Information Structure and
Intonation in Hijazi Arabic
Dissertation URL:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/papers/theses/Alzaidi14InforStruc.pdf
Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
Phonology
Pragmatics
Subject Language(s):
Arabic, Hijazi (acw)
Dissertation Director:
Louisa Sadler
Dissertation Abstract:
There is irrefutable evidence that many
languages use intonation to express the aspects
of the information structure of an utterance.
Recently evidence has emerged that languages
differ in how information structure (IS) is
marked intonationally. This thesis presents
experimental work on the prosodic encoding of
Information Focus and Contrastive Focus
(aspects of IS, that is, concepts relating to
the distribution of ‘new’ and ‘contrast’
information) in Hijazi Arabic (an
under-researched language). It provides both a
phonetic and a phonological analysis of the
experimental data, the latter couched in
Autosegmental-Metrical Approach. It aims to (i)
provide an analysis of the word order in Hijazi
Arabic (HA) and how it is used to express IS,
and (ii) provide an in-depth and systematic
analysis of the ways that intonation is used
both phonologically and phonetically to encode
neutral focus, information focus, in-situ
contrastive focus and ex-situ contrastive focus
in four focus structures: sentence-focus,
predicate-focus, argument-focus and focus
preposing structure.
Based on insights from recent research, we
propose two categories of Focus: information
focus and contrastive focus. We show how these
categories are reflected in HA word order and
in intonation.The results show that intonation
and not word order is crucial and useful in
identifying the focus of the HA utterance. They
show that focus has local and global effects on
the utterance. Focus attracts the nuclear pitch
accent, and compresses the pitch accent(s) of
the following word(s). Excursion size and the
maximum F0 are found to be the two main
acoustic correlates of prosodic focus in HA.
Focused words have significantly expanded
excursion size, post-focus words have
significantly lowered F0, but pre-focus words
lack systematic changes.
Page Updated: 18-Jul-2014