Abstract
Prosodic encoding of focus in Taifi Arabic is not yet fully understood. A recent production study found significant acoustic differences between syntactically identical sentences with information focus, contrastive focus and without focus. This paper presents results from a production experiment investigating whether information and contrastive focus have prosodic effects on the pitch-accent distributions. Using question-answer paradigms, 16 native speakers of Taifi Arabic were asked to read three target sentences in different focus conditions. Results reveal that every content word is pitch-accented in utterances with and without focus. However, there are very few cases (23.12%) in which the post-focus words are deaccented. The largest percentage of deaccentuation was observed in the utterances with initial contrastive focus. The results show that focus structures in Taifi Arabic show both deaccentuation and post-focus compression. Therefore, the prosodic realization of focus in Taifi Arabic is different from their counterparts in other Arabic dialects such as Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic. These findings have an important implication for both the prosodic typology and focus typology.
Highlights
Information and contrastive focuses are two concepts of information structure (IS); that is, concepts relating to new and contrast information (Halliday, 1967; Chafe, 1976)
This indicates that deaccentuation is not a common strategy used by speakers of Taifi Arabic to mark focus, as the case in Lebanese Arabic (Chahal, 2001)
When focus is sentence-initial, 111 out of 480 utterances (23.12%) display deaccenting of the post-focus words. It shows that deaccentuation of the post-focus words were observed in the data more in the utterances with narrow contrastive focus than in the utterances with narrow information focus (47 (19.58%) vs. 64 (26.67%)) Fourth, the table reveals that the two-pointed hat pattern was found in the data when the focused word is sentence-penultimate (27 out of 480 utterances = 5.62%)
Summary
Information and contrastive focuses are two concepts of information structure (IS); that is, concepts relating to new and contrast information (Halliday, 1967; Chafe, 1976). In an argument-focus structure, there is only one item in the structure that carries new (or new and contrastive/corrective) information in terms of the discourse, as exemplified in (1a, and 1b) below. On another level, focus is divided into information focus and contrastive focus (Halliday, 1967; Chafe, 1970; Kiss, 1998). The connection between accent distribution and information status in Germanic languages such as English is stronger than that in Romance languages such as Italian and Romanian (Cruttenden, 1993; Ladd, 2008; Swerts et al, 2002; Avesani & Vayra, 2005). In Germanic languages, words following focus are deaccented (Ladd, 2008), whereas in Romance languages, they are not (Cruttenden, 1993; Ladd, 2008; Gussenhoven, 2004; Swerts et al, 2002; Avesani & Vayra, 2005)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
