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Intonational Pitch Accent Distribution in Egyptian Arabic Samantha Jane

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Intonational Pitch Accent Distribution in Egyptian Arabic Samantha Jane Intonational pitch accent distribution in Egyptian Arabic Samantha Jane Hellmuth Submitted to the Department of Linguistics in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics and Phonetics School of Oriental and African Studies University of London March 2006 ProQuest Number: 10672847 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10672847 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Abstract Egyptian Arabic (EA) is a stress-accent language with postlexical intonational pitch accents. This thesis investigates EA pitch accents within the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework (Ladd 1996). The goal of the study is to identify the place of EA in the spectrum of cross-linguistic prosodic variation, and to resolve the challenge it presents to existing phonological accounts of pitch accent distribution. In a corpus of read and (semi-)spontaneous EA speech a pitch accent was found on (almost) every content word, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the same pitch accent type is observed on every word. The typological implications of EA pitch accent distribution are explored in the context of the typology of word-prosodic variation (Hyman 2001) and variation in the domain of pitch accent distribution is proposed as a new parameter of prosodic variation. A survey of EA prosodic phrasing and of the relative accentuation of function words and content words shows that the correct generalisation for EA is that there is a pitch accent on every Prosodic Word (PWd). A phonological analysis is proposed within Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), formalising the two-way relation between tone and prosodic prominence at all levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy. An experimental study suggests that alignment of the H peak in EA pitch accents varies with stressed syllable type (cf. Ladd et al 2000), and is analysed as phonological association of the pitch accent to the foot. A final experiment quantifies the prosodic reflexes of information and contrastive focus. Even when post-focal and ‘given’ EA words still bear a pitch accent, but there are gradient effects of focus in the form of pitch range manipulation. Independence of pitch accent distribution from information structure supports the formal analysis of EA pitch accent distribution within the phonological part of the grammar. 2 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Table of contents 3 Transliteration scheme used in the thesis for Egyptian Arabic 7 Acknowledgements 8 1 Outline summary of the thesis 10 2 Literature review 17 2.0 Outline of the chapter 17 2.1 An autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation 18 2.1.1 Pitch accents and boundary tones 19 2.1.2 Autosegmental postlexical tone 20 2.1.3 Pitch targets analysed as level tones 22 2.1.4 Transcription of intonation 22 2.1.5 Metrical structure as target of association of postlexical tone 24 2.2 A theory of ranked violable constraints 31 2.2.1 Modelling interaction of conflicting constraints on prosodic structure 31 2.2.2 Constraints on prosodic structure 32 2.2.3 Bringing tone and prosodic structure together 38 2.3 The prosody of Egyptian Arabic 39 2.3.1 The metrical phonology of EA 39 2.3.2 The intonation of spoken Arabic dialects 44 2.3.3 Prior work on the intonation of EA 45 2.3.4 Background to the research question of the thesis 47 2.4 Issues in data collection 48 2.5 Summary and conclusion 50 3 Pitch accent distribution in Egyptian Arabic 51 3.0 Outline and aims 51 3.1 Background: what is known about EA pitch accent distribution 52 3.2 Methodology: corpus survey 55 3.2.1 Materials 55 3.2.2 Transcription system 60 3.2.3 Research questions during transcription 62 3.3 Pitch accent distribution in EA - corpus survey results 63 3.3.1 Treatment of content words 63 3.3.2 Instances of unaccented content words in EA 66 3.3.3 Summary 69 3.4 A model of EA intonation 70 3.4.1 EA global pitch contours observed in the corpus survey 70 3.4.2 EA pitch accent types observed in the corpus survey 76 3.4.3 An AM model of EA intonation based on the corpus survey 82 3.4.4 Summary 86 3.5 Discussion: intonational typology 87 3.6 Conclusion 90 3 4 Word level prominence in Egyptian Arabic 91 4.0 Outline and aims 91 4.1 Theoretical Background 92 4.1.1 Assumptions in the literature that EA is a stress-accent language 92 4.1.2 Word level prominence and intonational typology 93 4.1.3 Word level prominence and word prosodic typology 95 4.1.4 Phonetic correlates of word stress in EA and other Arabic dialects 96 4.1.5 Methods used to investigate stress vs. non-stress accent 100 4.2 Word-level prominence in EA: edge marking or accentual marking? 102 4.2.1 Rationale 102 4.2.2 Methodology 103 4.2.3 Results 104 4.3 Investigating the phonetic correlates of word-level prominence in EA 108 4.3.1 Rationale 108 4.3.2 Methodology 109 4.3.3 Results: acoustic correlates of word level prominence in EA 111 4.4 Discussion: word-prosodic typology 113 4.5 Conclusion 116 5 The domain of pitch accent distribution in Egyptian Arabic 117 5.0 Outline and aims 117 5.1 Pitch accent distribution: where do pitch accents come from? 118 5.1.1 Accentuation and focus 118 5.1.2 The distribution of pitch accents 128 5.2 Pitch accent distribution as a reflex of prosodic structure 131 5.2.1 The (major) phonological phrase as domain of pitch accent distribution 132 5.2.2 The (minor) phonological phrase as domain of pitch accent distribution 136 5.2.3 Summary: pitch accent distribution as a reflex of prosodic structure 140 5.3 Evidence from prosodic phrasing in EA 140 5.3.1 Pitch accent distribution within a phrase-level constituent in EA? 142 5.3.2 Evidence that the PWd is not co-extensive with MaP in EA. 149 5.3.3 Evidence that the PWd is not co-extensive with MiP in EA. 154 5.3.4 Phrasing evidence from the narratives corpus 155 5.4 Pitch accent distribution within the Prosodic Word in EA? 158 5.4.1 Treatment of function words in the corpus. 158 5.4.2 The prosodic realisation of function words 162 5.4.3 Analysis of the accentuation of function words in EA. 167 5.4.4 The prosodic realisation of function words in EA. 168 5.4.5 Summary 173 5.5 Discussion 174 5.6 Summary 175 4 6 EA pitch accent distribution as a tone-prominence relation 177 6.0 Outline and aims 177 6.1 Tone-prominence relations 178 6.1.1 Tone-prominence: a two-way relationship 178 6.1.2 Tone-prominence: variation in the target of tonal association 183 6.1.3 A theory of tone<-»prominence relations 188 6.1.4 Testing the tone-prominence theory against EA 192 6.1.5 Summary 193 6.2 Analysing EA pitch accent distribution: formal analysis 194 6.2.1 The distribution of phonological tone in EA 194 6.2.2 Pitch accent distribution & the mapping of lexical words to PWds 196 6.2.3 Variation in accentuation of function words 201 6.2.4 Direction of cliticisation in EA 208 6.2.5 Summary 210 6.3 Discussion: a cross-linguistic theory of tone-prominence relations 211 6.3.1 Tone<-»prominence theory and word-prosodic typology 211 6.3.2 Tone-prominence theory and intonational typology 212 6.3.3 Insertion vs. spreading of intonational pitch accents 213 6.3.4 Pitch accent distribution: independent parameter of prosodic variation 215 6.4 Summary 216 7 Pitch accent alignment in Egyptian Arabic 219 7.0 Outline and aims 219 7.1 Background 220 7.1.1 Pitch accent alignment in autosegmental-metrical (AM) theory 220 7.1.2 Surface alignment and the phonological representation of pitch accents 226 7.1.3 Pitch accent alignment in Egyptian Arabic (EA) 229 7.2 Methodology 230 7.2.1 Materials and data collection 230 7.2.2 Data processing and analysis 232 7.2.3 Experimental hypotheses 233 7.3 Results 234 7.3.1 Choice of variables for comparison 234 7.3.2 Potential effects of factors external to the experimental design 236 7.3.3 The descriptive facts of EA alignment 239 7.3.4 Hypothesis testing 241 7.3.5 Explaining the fixed slope effects 246 7.3.6 Comparison with pitch accent alignment in other languages 247 7.4 Discussion 249 7.4.1 Pitch accent alignment patterns across different syllable types in EA 249 7.4.2 Towards a phonological representation of the EA pitch accent 250 7.4.3 Intonational TBUs and tone-prominence relations 252 7.5 Summary 254 5 8 Prosodic reflexes of focus in Egyptian Arabic 256 8.0 Outline and aims 256 8.1 Focus in EA and other languages 257 8.1.1 Types of focus 257 8.1.2 Focus in Egyptian Arabic 262 8.1.3 Categorical vs.
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