The domain of emphasis spread in Arabic: Evidence from Urban Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This paper investigated the domain of emphasis spreading in Urban Jordanian Arabic. Emphasis spreading was 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 were used as the acoustic correlates of emphasis spreading in the participants’ speech who were ten native speakers of Urban Jordanian Arabic. The findings showed 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 showed that emphasis spreading applies leftward and rightward in all environments but with some significant differences. Morpheme boundaries were found opaque to emphasis spreading.