The prosody of theme, rheme and focus in Egyptian Arabic: A quantitative investigation of tunes, configurations and speaker variability

Abstract

This paper investigates the prosody of sentences elicited in three Information Structure (IS) conditions: all-new, theme-rheme and rhematic focus-background. The sentences were produced by 18 speakers of Egyptian Arabic (EA). This is the first quantitative study to provide a comprehensive analysis of holistic f0 contours (by means of GAMM) and configurations of f0, duration and intensity (by means of FPCA) associated with the three IS conditions, both across and within speakers. A significant difference between focus-background and the other information structure conditions was found, but also strong inter-speaker variation in terms of strategies and the degree to which these strategies were applied. The results suggest that post-focus register lowering and the duration of the stressed syllables of the focused and the utterance-final word are more consistent cues to focus than a higher peak of the focus accent. In addition, some independence of duration and intensity from f0 could be identified. These results thus support the assumption that, when focus is marked prosodically in EA, it is marked by prominence. Nevertheless, the fact that a considerable number of EA speakers did not apply prosodic marking and the fact that prosodic focus marking was gradient rather than categorical suggest that EA does not have a fully conventionalized prosodic focus construction.