LLS Colloquium: Prosody in two varieties of Levantine Arabic: stress and focus

On Wednesday 3rd May 2023, Niamh Kelly  (Newcastle University) will be presenting on "Prosody in two varieties of Levantine Arabic: stress and focus".

Talk: Prosody in two varieties of Levantine Arabic: stress and focus
Research on prosody in varieties of Arabic has recently expanded, with the addition of phonetic and phonological research into intonation, focus and lexical stress. Despite this, there is a lot left to know about spoken varieties of Arabic. This talk will describe some of the results from controlled phonetic experiments on two varieties of Levantine Arabic: tonal alignment and stress in Lebanese Arabic, and stress in Palestinian Arabic. In the first study, focused words in Lebanese Arabic are examined for their patterns of tonal alignment, with the finding that the f0 peak is relatively stable, not being significantly affected by syllable structure or phonological vowel length. The next study examines the acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Palestinian Arabic, as well as its interaction with pharyngealisation. Stressed vowels are found to have higher mean f0 and intensity and greater duration than unstressed vowels, and pharyngealisation interacts in complex ways with the correlates of stress. The final study examines the acoustic correlates of lexical stress in broad and narrow focus in a pilot study on Lebanese Arabic. This study finds only vowel quality (F1 & F2) to be a correlate of lexical stress, while focus is realised through intensity, duration and f0 range. This research adds add to typological work on the phonetic correlates of suprasegmental patterns in non-Indo-European languages.

The talk will take place at 3pm, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. There will also be an informal reception afterwards in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science (Deborah Hines Room, 2nd floor). Everyone is welcome!