Abstract
Research on a variety of languages has shown that vowel duration is influenced by phonological vowel length as well as syllable structure (e.g., Maddieson 1997). Further, the phonological concept of a mora has been shown to relate to phonetic measurements of duration (Port, Dalby, & O’Dell 1987; Hubbard 1993; Cohn 2003). In Levantine Arabic, non-final closed syllables that contain a long vowel have been described as partaking in mora-sharing (Broselow, Chen, & Huffman 1997; Khattab & Al-Tamimi 2014). The current investigation examines the effect of vowel length and syllable structure on vowel duration, as well as how this interacts with durational effects of prosodic focus. Disyllabic words with initial, stressed syllables that were either open or closed and contained either a long or a short vowel were examined when non-focused and in contrastive focus. Contrastive focus was associated with longer words, stressed syllables and phonologically long vowels. Short vowels were shorter when in a syllable closed by a singleton but not by a geminate consonant, while long vowels were not shortened before coda singletons. An analysis is proposed whereby long vowels followed by an intervocalic consonant cluster are parsed as open syllables, with the first consonant forming a semisyllable (Kiparsky 2003), while long vowels followed by geminate consonants partake in mora-sharing (Broselow, Huffman, Chen, & Hsieh 1995). The results also indicate compensatory shortening for short vowels followed by a singleton coda.
Highlights
The current investigation examines segments in Lebanese Arabic to determine the phonetic effects of syllable structure as well as to illuminate phonological theories of mora-sharing
This study found that both long and short vowels were shorter before geminate consonants than singleton consonants, and Al-Tamimi notes that these findings are language-specific but variety-specific, because this pattern was not found for Iraqi Arabic
The best model was one with Condition and Onset Complexity as independent fixed factors, without an interaction, and random intercepts for Speaker and Token (R code: lmer(Word.Duration ∼ Condition + Onset + (1|Spk) + (1|Token))). This model showed that word duration was longer when the word was in contrastive focus and when it had a complex onset (CC), (Figure 4)
Summary
The current investigation examines segments in Lebanese Arabic to determine the phonetic effects of syllable structure as well as to illuminate phonological theories of mora-sharing. That are “prosodically licensed by adjunction to a superordinate prosodic category” (p.154) This analysis states that VC-dialects (which include Lebanese Arabic) would not shorten a long vowel in non-final CVVC because the C is instead a semisyllable, meaning that it weighs a mora but it is not part of the same syllable as the preceding vowel. Geminate consonants in Arabic have generally been analyzed as being linked to a single mora (Abu-Salim & Abdel-Jawad 1988; Bamakhramah 2009; Davis & Ragheb 2014), meaning that when they are in word-medial (intervocalic) position, they are weightless as the onset of the second syllable but weigh one mora as the coda of the first syllable (Hayes 1989; Khattab & Al-Tamimi 2014). One aim of the current study is to test these findings on a larger scale
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