A Prosodic Account of Negation in Jordanian Arabic

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v23i2.463

Keywords:

acoustic analysis, Jordanian Arabic, morphosyntactic variation, negation, prosody

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between negation variation in Jordanian Arabic and prosody. Inspired by a variationist study (Sallakh 2021) which found that transitivity and tense had major effects on the choice of negation variants in Jordanian Arabic, we provide phonological and acoustic analyses of tokens involving transitive and intransitive verbs. Our results show that intransitive verbs are more likely to occur in discontinuous negation ma:- -ʃ because the verb is not prosodically parsed with a complement. On the other hand, transitive verbs tend to take pre-verbal ma: since the verb is prosodically parsed with its complement hence disfavoring the addition of another syllable to the MiP of the verb and its complement. Similarly, our phonological and prosodic analyses show that tense also affects negation variant choice as discontinuous negation is more frequent in past tense because it does not have any tense or agreement proclitics or enclitics. Present tense disfavors discontinuous negation because of the proclitics and enclitics it is attached to. Finally, to support the prosodic analysis, we conducted an acoustic analysis that investigated negator duration, pitch, intensity inter alia.

Author Biographies

Ayman Yasin , Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan

Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan

Ekab Al-Shawashreh , Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

Department of English Language & Literature,

Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

Hussien Obeidat , Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

Department of English Language & Literature,

Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

Shafiq Irshidat St. 21163

Rasheed Aljarrah, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

Department of English Language & Literature,

Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan

References

Abdelghany, Hala. (2010). Prosodic phrasing and modifier attachment in Standard Arabic sentence processing. PhD Dissertation, City University of New York.

Al-Ani, Saleh. (1992). ‘Lexical stress variation in Arabic: An acoustic spectrographic analysis’. Proceedings of the Colloquium on Arabic Grammar. Budapest, Hungary: The Arabist, 9-27.

Al-Jarrah, Rasheed. (2002). An optimality-theoretic analysis of stress in the English of native speakers of Arabic. PhD Dissertation, Ball State University.

Alqassas, Ahmad. (2012). The morpho-syntax and pragmatics of Levantine Arabic negation: A synchronic and diachronic analysis. PhD Dissertation, Indiana University.

Alsalem, Eman. (2012). Negation in standard and Kuwaiti Arabic. MA thesis. Retrieved from https;//core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10(2012)33.pdf.

Al-Shawashreh, Ekab, Marwan Jarrah and Mutasim Deaibes. (2019). ‘A prosodic account of wh-formation in Jordanian Arabic’. Lingua, 231: 1-27.

Angoujard, Jean-Pierre. (1990). Metrical Structure of Arabic. Dordrecht: Foris Publication.

Aoun, Joseph, El-abbass Benmamoun and Lina Choueiri. (2010). The Syntax of Arabic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bani Younes, Mohammad. (2020). The role of phonology in the disambiguation of disjunctive questions. PhD Dissertation, York: University of York.

Bani Younes, Mohammad and Sam Hellmuth. (2020). ‘Disambiguating cues of disjunctive questions’. In A. Botinis (ed.), Proceedings of 11 the International Conference of Experimental Linguistics, 11 (PP. 1-4). Athens: University of Athens.

Boersma, Paul and David Weenink. (2019). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (Version 6.0. 52) [Windows].

Brame, Michael. (1974). ‘The cycle in phonology: Stress in Palestinian, Maltese, and Spanish’. Linguistic Inquiry, 5(1): 39-60.‏

Chiang, Wen-Yu, Chang-Liao and Fang-Mei Chiang. (2006). ‘The prosodic realization of negation in Saisiyat and English’. Oceanic linguistics, 110-132.

Chomsky, Naom. (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

De Jong, Kenneth and Bushra Zawaydeh. (1999). ‘Stress, duration, and intonation in Arabic word-level prosody’. Journal of Phonetics, 27: 3-22.

De Swart, Henrieete. (2009). Expression and Interpretation of Negation: An OT Typology. Vol. 77. London: Springer Science and Business Media.

El-Hassan, Shahir. (1990). ‘Intonation in the educated spoken Arabic of Jordan: The patterning of accents’. Abhath Al-Yarmouk, 8(2): 7–31.

Endress, Ansgar and Marc Hauser. (2010). ‘Word segmentation with universal prosodic cues’. Cognitive psychology, 61(2): 177-199.‏

Falaus, Anamaria. 2007. ‘Double negation and negative concord: The Romanian puzzle’. Selected papers from the 36th Linguistics Symposium on Romance Languages, ed. by J. Camacho and V. Déprez, 135– 48. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Gussenhoven, Carlos. (1991). ‘The English rhythm rule as an accent deletion rule’. Phonology, 8(1): 1-35.

Hayes, Bruce. (1995). Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Free Press.

Hellmuth, Sam. (2004). ‘Prosodic weight and phonological phrasing in Cairene Arabic’. In N. Adams, A. Cooper, F. Perrill, & T. Wier (eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: The Main Session (pp.97-111). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Hellmuth, Sam. (2006). ‘Focus-related pitch range manipulation (and peak alignment effects) in Egyptian Arabic’. Proceedings of Speech Prosody. Dresden.

Hellmuth, Sam. (2007). ‘The relationship between prosodic structure and pitch accent distribution: Evidence from Egyptian Arabic’. The Linguistic Review, 24: 289-314.

Hellmuth, Sam. (2016). ‘Exploring the syntax-phonology interface in Arabic’. In Stuart Davis and Usama Soltan (eds.), Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVII, 75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hellmuth, Sam. (2018). ‘Variation in polar interrogative contours within and between Arabic dialects’. Proceedings of Speech Prosody. Poznań, Poland, 13-16.

Hellmuth, Sam. (2020). ‘Contact and variation in Arabic intonation’. In Christopher Lucas and Stefano Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced change, 583–601. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3744553

Hirschberg, Julia. (1993). ‘Pitch accent in context’. Artificial Intelligence 63:305.40.

Horn, Larry. (2001). A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hoyt, Frederick. (2014). ‘Prosodic constituency and locality in Levantine Arabic long-distance negative concord’. In R. Khamis-Dakwar and K. Fround (eds.), Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics, 2, 47-74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Huneety, Anas, Bassil Mashaqba, Riyad abu Hula, and Baraah Khalid Thnaibat. (2021). ‘Phonological aspects of al-Issa Arabic, a Bedouin dialect in the north of Jordan’. Heliyon, 7(7): e07405.

Jaradat, Abdelaziz. (2018). The syntax-prosody interface of Jordanian Arabic (Irbid Dialect) (Doctoral dissertation), University of Ottawa, Canada.

Jun, Sun-Ah. (1998). ‘The accentual phrase in the Korean prosodic hierarchy’. Phonology, 15(2): 189-226.‏

Kadmon, Nirit. (2001). Formal Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kiparsky, Paul. (2006). Universals constrain change; Change results in typological generalizations. Stanford University.

Kubozono, Hauro. (2003). The Syllable as a Unit of Prosodic Organization in Japanese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.‏

Lassadi, Boutheina. ((2005)). The syntax and semantics of optional wh-movement: The case of Egyptian Arabic. PhD Dissertation, University of Ottawa, Canada.

Loutfi, Ayoub. (2019). ‘A morpho-syntactic analysis of negation in Moroccan Arabic’. The International Journal of Arabic Linguistics, 10(1): 45-66.

Lucas, Christopher. (2009). The development of negation in Arabic and Afro-Asiatic. PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge.

Lucas, Christopher and Elliott Lash. (2010). ‘Contact as catalyst: The case for Coptic influence in the development of Arabic negation’. Journal of Linguistics, 46(2): 379-413.

Malaia, Evguenia, Ronnie Wilbur and Christine Weber-Fox. (2009). ‘ERP evidence for telicity effects on syntactic processing in garden-path sentences’. Brain and language, 108(3): 145-158.‏

Mashaqba, Bassil. (2015). The phonology and morphology of Wadi Ramm Arabic. PhD Dissertation, University of Salford, United Kingdom.

Mashaqba, Bassil and Anas Huneety. (2018). ‘Emergence of iambs in Eastern Arabic: Metrical iambicity dominating optimal nonfinality’. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 15(3): 15-36.

Miestamo, Matti. (2007). ‘Negation–an overview of typological research’. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5): 552-570.

Mitchell, Terence. (1993). Pronouncing Arabic II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mitleb, Fares. (1984). ‘Voicing effect on vowel duration is not an absolute universal’. Journal of Phonetics, 12: 23-27.

Mrayat, Ahmad. (2015). ‘Negative particles and morphemes in Jordanian Arabic dialects’. Journal of Education and Practice, 6(36): 87 – 90.

Murphy, Isa. (2014). The realization of negation in the Syrian Arabic clause, phrase, and word. PhD Dissertation. Dublin: Trinity College Dublin.

Nespor, Marina and Wendy Sandler. (1999). ‘Prosody in Israeli sign language’. Language and speech, 42(2-3): 143-176.‏

Nespor, Marina and Irene Vogel. (2007). Prosodic Phonology: With a New Foreword (Vol. 28).‏ Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Nolan, Francis. (2006). ‘Intonation’. In Bas Aarts and April McMahon (eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics (pp. 433-457). New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Poser, William. (1984). The phonetics and phonology of tone and intonation in Japanese. PhD Dissertation. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.‏

Richards, Norbert. (2010). Uttering trees. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Sakarna, Ahmad. (2002). ‘The Bedouin dialect of Al-Zawaida tribe, southern Jordan’. Al-Arabiyya 35: 61–86.

Salem, Murad. (2003). Bare nominals, focus structure, and reference in Germanic, Romance and Semitic. PhD Dissertation. Michigan: Michigan State University.

Sallakh, Mais. (2021). Negation in Jordanian children's speech: A variationist approach. MA Thesis, Yarmouk University, Jordan.

Soltan, Usama. (2010). ‘On licensing wh-scope: Wh-questions in Egyptian Arabic revisited’. In: Proceedings of the (2010) Georgetown University Round Table on Arabic, 99: 99-114.

Tang, Guolin, Diane Brentari, Carolina González and Felix Sze. (2010). ‘Crosslinguistic variation in the use of prosodic cues: The case of blinks’. In D. Brentari (ed.), Sign Languages: A Cambridge Language Survey, 519-542. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tian, Ye and Richard Breheny. (2016). ‘Dynamic pragmatic view of negation processing’. Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives, 21-43.

Vaissière, Jacqueline. (1983). ‘Language-independent prosodic features’. In A. Cutler and D. R. Ladd (eds), Prosody: Models and measurements, 53-66. New York: Berlin Heidelberg.‏

Watanabe, Akira. (2004). ‘The genesis of Negative Concord’. Linguistic Inquiry 35:559 – 612

Watson, Janet. (2007). The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yasin, Ayman. (2012). Syntax-prosody interface: Evidence from wh-movement in Jordanian Arabic and Egyptian Arabic. PhD Dissertation. West: Purdue University.

Zeijlstra, Hedde. (2007). ‘Negation in natural language: On the form and meaning of negative elements’. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5):498–518.

Zuraiq, Wael and Jie Zhang. (2006). ‘Phonological assimilation in urban Jordanian Arabic’. Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 28: 33-64.

Downloads

Date of Publication

2023-06-20

How to Cite

Yasin , A., Al-Shawashreh , E., Obeidat , H., & Aljarrah, R. (2023). A Prosodic Account of Negation in Jordanian Arabic. International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 23(2), 249–276. https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v23i2.463

Issue

Section

Table of Contents