The intonation of Lebanese and Egyptian Arabic

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe aspects of the prosody of two Arabic dialects which have been studied within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework, namely (Tripoli) Lebanese Arabic and (Cairene) Egyptian Arabic. We do not claim to provide a model for Arabic intonation in general, nor a model of Arabic dialectal intonational variation, since research in this field is still largely unexplored 1 . Instead, we outline our independent findings for Lebanese and Egyptian Arabic (based on Chahal (2001) and Hellmuth (2006b) respectively) and compare the results of this research wherever possible. We show that significant variation between Arabic varieties exists and needs to be taken into account in an overall intonational model of the language.The LA data reported on in this chapter illustrates the variety spoken in the Northern city of Tripoli as used by seven educated urban speakers. The LA corpus comprises read data obtained from two controlled experiments examining issues of tonal alignment, phonetic correlates of prominence and focus (totaling 2970 utterances) and quasi-natural data elicited from a map-task conversation (in line with the HCRC map- We wish to acknowledge our debt to the speakers of LA and EA who provided our speech recordings and to colleagues in the Phonetics Lab of the University of Melbourne and the University of York; we thank Sun-Ah Jun and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript; all errors are our own. Data excerpts from the CallHome Egyptian Arabic Speech Supplement (Karins et al 2002) are included on the accompanying CD by kind permission of the Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia. The authors' names appear in alphabetical order.1 For a summary of broad literature findings on various Arabic dialects, see Chahal (2006 X.2 Metrical phonologyArabic is classified as a stress accent language 2 (McCarthy 1979;Watson 2002 To avoid this problem, for LA, Chahal (2001; identified three levels of prominence (by auditory analysis) in a corpus of broad and narrow focus utterances:lexically stressed but unaccented syllables, lexically stressed and accented syllables, and nuclear accents (defined as the last, most prominent accent in a phrase). In both focus conditions, and all else being equal, syllables at higher levels of prominence showed higher F0 and/or higher RMS values, and/or longer duration, and more peripheral F1 and F2 vowel formant characteristics than the lower level (ANOVA results significant at p<0.001). 7 By differentiating between phrasal (accents and nuclear accents) and word-level prominence (lexically stressed but unaccented 6 Cf. Beckman & Edwards (1994).7 Note that although F0 is found to be the main correlate of prominence level for narrow focus utterances, it is not so for broad focus utterances. This is due to the "flat hat" contours (t'Hart et al, The evidence to date therefore suggests that phrase-level prominence in LA and EA is cued by both melodic and dynamic correlates, as also reported for other dialects. This matches the typo...

Is there an interlanguage intelligibility benefit in perception of English word stress?

“…Crossdialectal variation in the acoustic cues to stress is likely, since cross-dialectal variation in phonological stress assignment is well established (Watson, 2011). In addition, some dialects such as Egyptian Arabic (EA) display consistent co-occurrence of stress and accent: the stressed syllable of almost all content words also carries sentencelevel accent (Chahal & Hellmuth, 2015).…”

The Phonetics and Phonology of the Polish Calling Melodies

“…This differs from the other routine calls in table 2, which are best characterized as instantiations of the vocative chant since they end in sustained level pitch. Though this difference is relevant for and reflected in the AM representation of the Polish routine call, it is important to recognize that it pertains (Chahal and Hellmuth, 2014) L+H* H-L% Catalan (Borràs-Comes et al, 2015) L+H* !H% Dutch (Gussenhoven, 2005) H*!H* % English H* or L+H* !H-L% German (Grice et al, 2005) L+H* H-% Greek (Arvaniti and Baltazani, 2005) L*H !H-!H% Hungarian (Varga, 2008) H* !H-0% Polish (this study) LH* !H-H% Portuguese (Frota, 2014;Frota et al, 2015) (L+)H* !H% Urgent (or insistent) calls Catalan (Prieto, 2014) L+H* HL% Portuguese (Frota, 2014;Frota et al, 2015) H Polish Calling Contours to form alone and not to the function of the melody. In some of the languages represented in table 2, such as English (Gussenhoven, 2004;Ladd, 2008a), andHungarian (Varga, 2008), the vocative chant is used to convey 'routineness': it is used to call for an everyday reason someone who is not in the immediate vicinity.…”

Speaker-specific intonational marking of narrow focus in Egyptian Arabic

“…Egyptian Arabic (EA) has featured prominently in prosodic typology research as an intonation language with a number of distinct aspects [1]. According to research in the autosegmentalmetrical framework [2], the intonational inventory of EA is limited to a single pitch accent type [3]. This might be related to the fact that EA, unlike languages with larger pitch accent type inventories [4], does not appear to use prosody to encode information status (i.e.…”