AN INITIAL ACCOUNT OF THE INTONATION OF EMIRATI ARABIC

Allison Blodgett, Jonathan Owens & Trent Rockwood
University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language

ID 1272
[full paper]

We conducted auditory and visual analyses of recordings of colloquial Emirati Arabic in order to develop an autosegmental-metrical account of the intonation. Based on our analyses, we propose an initial tonal inventory of two main pitch accents (i.e., H*, (LH)*), one downstepped variant (i.e., !H*), and four bitonal phrase accents (i.e., LL%, LH%, HL%, HH%), which mark the right edges of intonation phrases. The data suggest that speakers produce a pitch accent on every content word and can use pitch range compression to vary the position of the perceptually most prominent pitch accent within a prosodic phrase. The data further suggest that speakers can initiate and complete compression within a prosodic phrase and that they can extend that compression across silent durations to subsequent phrases.

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