Arabic-L:LING:New Dissertation: Information Structure and Intonation in Hijazi Arabic

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Fri 18 Jul 2014
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Date: 18 Jul 2014
From: Muhammad Alzaidi <mohd.zaidi2007 at gmail.com>
Subject: New Dissertation: Information Structure and Intonation in Hijazi
Arabic

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
<http://bit.ly/horeshphd>

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology
                     Phonetics
                     Pragmatics

Subject Language(s): Arabic, Hijazi Arabic


Dissertation Director(s):
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.

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