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1. Text-tune Alignment in Tunisian Arabic Yes-No Questions


 
Dublin Core PKP Metadata Items Metadata for this Document
 
1. Title Title of document 1. Text-tune Alignment in Tunisian Arabic Yes-No Questions - Prosodic Variation (with)in Languages
 
2. Creator Author's name, affiliation, country Sam Hellmuth; Univ of York; United Kingdom
 
3. Subject Discipline(s) Linguistics
 
4. Subject Keyword(s) prosodic variation; intonation; prosodic phrasing; cross-linguistic variation; prosodic realisation; interrogatives; Arabic dialects
 
5. Subject Subject classification Phonetics; Phonology
 
6. Description Abstract This paper reveals a pattern of vowel epenthesis in Tunisian Arabic yes-no questions which is – at least partly – prosodically conditioned. In our data, the final nuclear accent in yes-no questions is commonly a (delayed peak) rise followed by a complex boundary tone (analysed here as L*+H H-L%), and, in such tokens, an epenthetic vowel is frequently appended to the last lexical item by some speakers. This pattern of utterance-final vowel epenthesis has not previously been reported in the small literature on Tunisian Arabic intonation, nor in other work on the intonation patterns of neighbouring dialects of Arabic, to the best of our knowledge. Systematic investigation of corpus data reveals that many of the contextual factors which have been shown to condition word-final epenthesis in European Portuguese and Italian do not play a role in the incidence of word-final epenthesis in Tunisian Arabic. Instead, in Tunisian Arabic, the primary conditioning factors for word-final epenthesis are discourse function (yes-no questions) and prosodic contour (complex rise-fall), with a secondary effect of gender (the pattern is produced more frequently by female speakers). The results suggest that the Tunisian Arabic word-final epenthetic vowel is not a case of ‘text- tune’ adjustment, but functions instead as a question particle. The potential historical origins of the pattern, and its current sociolinguistic indexical function, are briefly discussed.
 
7. Publisher Organizing agency, location Equinox Publishing Ltd
 
8. Contributor Sponsor(s)
 
9. Date (YYYY-MM-DD) 22-Apr-2022
 
10. Type Status & genre Peer-reviewed Article
 
11. Type Type
 
12. Format File format PDF
 
13. Identifier Uniform Resource Identifier https://journals.equinoxpub.com/index.php/books/article/view/30065
 
14. Identifier Digital Object Identifier 10.1558/equinox.30065
 
15. Source Journal/conference title; vol., no. (year) Equinox eBooks Publishing; Prosodic Variation (with)in Languages
 
16. Language English=en en
 
18. Coverage Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.)
 
19. Rights Copyright and permissions Copyright 2014 Equinox Publishing Ltd