SOAS Research Online

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 & Smolen.sky 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. Independence of pitch accent distribution from information structure supports the formal analysis of EA pitch accent distribution within the phonological part of the grammar.