Intonational phonology of Farasani Arabic: intonation ignores stress unless a word is focused

Abstract

This study proposes an Autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology of Farasani Arabic, an under-documented dialect of Arabic spoken in the Farasan Islands, Saudi Arabia. Tonal patterns of utterances, produced in neutral and narrow focus contexts, were examined by varying the length of a word and a phrase, the location of stress, syntactic structures, and sentence types. Results suggest that Farasani Arabic has three prosodic units higher than a word: Intonational Phrase > Intermediate Phrase > Accentual Phrase (AP). An AP is defined by a rising tonal pattern, [L Ha], without including a pitch accent, even though the language has stress. This is unique among Arabic dialects and also typologically unusual. So far, only a few languages (e.g., Kuot, Uyghur) have been claimed to be an exception to the association between stress and intonational pitch accent. A further unique feature of Farasani Arabic is that a pitch accent (H*) does occur on the stressed syllable of a word when the word is emphasized (in this case, the AP final tone is Low, i.e., [L H* La]). In other words, stress is partially involved in the intonation system of Farasani Arabic, further challenging the current models of intonational phonology and prosodic typology.