Acoustic exponents of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This paper investigates the domain of emphasis spreading in Urban Jordanian Arabic. Emphasis spreading is examined in two types of words: polysyllabic monomorphemic and polymorphemic. F1 raising, F2 lowering, and F3 raising in the vowels preceding and following the emphatic sound are used as the acoustic correlates of emphasis spreading in the participants’ speech who are 10 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. The findings show that emphasis is a morphophonemic process in that the domain of emphasis spread in Urban Jordanian Arabic is the morpheme rather than the syllable or the word. Second, the study shows that emphasis spreading applies leftward and rightward in all environments but with some significant differences. Morpheme boundaries are found opaque to emphasis spreading.