Sam Hellmuth
Thesis:
Hellmuth, S.
2006. Intonational pitch accent distribution in Egyptian
Arabic.
School of
Oriental & African Studies,
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whole thesis
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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.
structure supports the formal analysis of EA pitch accent distribution within the
phonological part of the grammar.