The Domain of Emphasis Spreading in Rural Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

Emphasis spread has been empirically investigated in a number of Arabic vernaculars. Previous accounts of its (non-)application indicate that its domain varies across dialects, ranging from the adjacent vowels to the syllable, to the morpheme, and finally to the (phonological) word. This research paper, which contains an experiment analyzing data from 14 native speakers of Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA) spoken in Irbid, explores the domain of emphasis spread in this sub-variety, which is an understudied dialect. The results show that emphasis spread is not sensitive to the adjacent vowels or the syllable, but rather to the morpheme type; that is, it applies to suffixes and proclitics, but not to clitics, unless the source of emphasis is very close to the target clitic. Following Selkirk (1996) and consistent with Jaradat (2018), we propose a prosodic account to emphasize spread in RJA: proclitics and suffixes are prosodically integrated into the host stem, and therefore they allow emphasis spread. On the contrary, clitics are prosodically free. Hence, the prosodic word boundary between a stem and a clitic blocks emphasis spread from the stem onto the clitic, unless the source of emphasis is too close to the target clitic. This implies that the domain of emphasis spread is not only dialect-specific, but may also differ among the sub-varieties of one Arabic dialect.