A PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL STUDY OF ARABIC EMPHASIS

This study comprehensively relates the phonetic and phonological representations of emphasis (tongue-root retraction) in Palestinian Arabic. Most work published on this topic until now has been exclusively phonetic or exclusively phonological and as a result has not captured the interaction between the phonetic make-up of a word and the phonological feature of emphasis. This study integrates phonetics and phonology to present a phonological analysis of emphasis based on detailed acoustic observations. Spectrograms made from over three hundred sentences recorded by four male Palestinian informants provide the acoustic data for this study. Among the findings is the fact that sounds articulated with a high second formant--/s/, /y/, /ii/ and /i#/--effectively stop the spread of emphasis in the word. Other findings provide counterevidence to two commonly held beliefs about emphasis. First, it is conclusively shown that the /r/, which has often been taken to be inherently emphatic due to its effect on nearby sounds, cannot be considered emphatic in Palestinian Arabic. The effect of /r/ on adjacent segments is weaker and less pervasive than that of emphasis and, as a result, must not be analyzed as emphasis. Second, the data from this study indicate that an acoustic difference exists between segments which are emphatic on the underlying level and those which merely acquire emphasis through spreading.; These findings provide the foundation for a phonological description of emphasis. Both the feature representation of emphasis within the segment and the phonological representation of emphatic segments within the word are handled. The interaction of high second formant (palatal) sounds with emphasis means that neither syllable-based prosodic analyses nor a standard generative analysis with a assimilation rule can correctly predict the spread of emphasis in a word. However, a model based on autosegmental phonology is found to effectively handle this palatal-emphatic interaction and is adopted as preferable to the prosodic or standard generative approaches.