Prosodic Structure of Farasani Arabic: Accentual Phrase without a Pitch Accent

Abstract

This study proposes a model of intonational phonology of Farasani Arabic, a dialect of Arabic spoken on the Farasan Islands, Saudi Arabia, based on the Autosegmental-Metrical framework [1], [2], [3]. Tonal patterns of utterances, produced in neutral and narrow focus contexts, were collected from seven Farasani native speakers. The findings show that Farasani Arabic, which has lexical stress, is typologically unique in that it has no pitch accent unless a word is emphasized. Instead, in neutral focus, most words form an Accentual Phrase (AP), marked by a Low tone on its left edge and a High tone (Ha) on its right edge. Additionally, there are two prosodic units above the AP: an Intermediate Phrase (ip) and an Intonational Phrase (IP). An ip is marked, on its final syllable, by a high boundary tone (H-), which is higher than the preceding Ha tone and delimits syntactic constituents such as relative clauses, adjuncts, and alternative questions. An IP is defined by a boundary tone [H%, L%, !H%, or HLH%] on its final syllable, overriding the boundary tone of the lower prosodic units. The findings on the AP and lack of pitch accents are discussed in terms of the typology of word-prominence type.