Emphasis spread: The domain and trigger

Abstract

This paper investigates the domain and directionality of emphasis spread in Urban Jordanian Arabic. The acoustic coarticulatory effects of emphasis are also probed. Nine native speakers of the dialect were recorded reading tri-syllabic monomorphemic and bimorphemic minimal pairs. The minimal pairs contained the voiceless emphatic fricative/sˁ/and its plain counterpart/s/in word initial and word final contexts. The acoustic correlates of emphasis measured were F1, F2, and F3 in the vowels following (i.e., word-initial) and preceding the emphatic sound (i.e., word-final). The results have roughly corroborated our findings in previous research where we claimed that the morpheme is, though disproportionately, still a confounding factor of emphasis spread. The most interesting contribution of this research is the perplexing behavior of emphasis spreading when crossing over the morpheme boundaries. Whereas the influence of the emphatic sound is evident on the morpheme falling to its left (e.g. prefixes) is evident, its influence on the morpheme falling to its right (i.e. suffixes) is less clear. In other words, one could argue that the boundary between the stem and the suffix is more robust compared to the boundary between the stem and the prefix. Therefore, a line of demarcation, we hypothesize, should be drawn between suffix boundary and prefix boundary.