Author’s name:
Arina A. Gerasimova – Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
Abstract:
The article seeks to describe the prosodic characteristics of Arabic words in the Syrian dialect including stress, phonological length, and vowel changes in auslauts, to find statistical relationships between prosodic factors and acoustic characteristics (duration, fundamental frequency (F0), intensity of syllables), and, finally, to examine the interaction of stress and the position of the syllabic carrier in the auslaut.
Six native speakers of the Syrian dialect of Arabic were involved in the experiment: three men and three women. To compile a corpus of realizations for the experiment, a recording was made of reading the story Madrasatīl‘ūla “My First School” by Jirji Zeidan. A total of 3088 implementations were analysed. For the first time, a glottograph was employed for this type of research, allowing for a higher degree of accuracy in calculating the frequency of the vocal cords’ vibration. Quantitative indicators were obtained using the Praat analysis program. The measurement results were normalized by the z-score method and processed by the SPSS statistical package using a multivariate general linear model.
Based on the analysis of the speech of six Syrian native speakers, we can assume that the main role in the formation of the prosody of Arabic words is played by the duration of the syllabic carrier (p = 0.001) together with the integral parameters that are based on it (p ≤ 0.029). In the stressed syllable, the duration of the syllable carrier increased by an average of 18.45 % compared to the unstressed syllable. The role of the fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity separately in word stress turned out to be insignificant. Putting a syllabic carrier in the auslaut word also lengthens it (p < 0.001) by 27.12 %. However, fundamental frequency F0 (p = 0.024) and intensity (p = 0.004) also turned out to be significant, as the frequency of the fundamental frequency F0 in the auslaut falls by 3.83 %, and the intensity by 1.66 %. That is, the duration, on the one hand, and the fundamental frequency F0 and intensity, on the other hand, act in different directions. Replacing a short vowel with a long vowel lengthens the syllabic carrier by an av-erage of 45.12 % (p < 0.001). In general, the stress in the Syrian dialect of Arabic can be characterized as quantitative.
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2023-62-2-9-27 |
| Downloads | 180 |
| Key words | Arabic; Syrian dialect; stress; prosody; experimental phonetics; glottograph; z-score; linear regression |