Prosody and Syntax in Hijazi Arabic Gapping

What is it about?

This study is the first to examine how speakers deal with structural ambiguity arising from elliptical gapping constructions like Shahad saw Aahad at the library and Samar at the mall, which may be interpreted with a gapping structure (both Shahad and Samar saw Aahad) or a non-gapping structure (Shahad saw both Aahad and Samar). The central question of this study explores the role that prosody plays in resolving such ambiguity in Hijazi Arabic. Analysis of productions from 24 native speakers reveals that various prosodic cues, such as mean F0, max F0, intensity, and excursion size, are used for unambiguous sentences, while pause occurrence, pause duration, and pitch accents are additionally utilised as disambiguation cues when ambiguity is recognised. The study reveals that speakers phonetically reflect syntactic structural differences in ambiguous sentences, particularly in relation to gapping. This distinction becomes more apparent when speakers are aware of ambiguity.

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Photo by Logan Gutierrez on Unsplash

Photo by Logan Gutierrez on Unsplash