Syntax, Phonology, or Both?

Abstract

The realisation of focus in Makkan Arabic (MA) phonology and word order has not been investigated yet. Therefore, this study aims to find answers to (a) to what extent prosodic prominence marking is used; (b) which pitch accent patterns can occur in sentences without and with focus; and (c) whether and how broad focus, information focus and contrastive focus are realised in word order. Two experiments were conducted: production and perception. In the production experiment, a question-answer paradigm was used to elicit information focus and contrastive focus at three sentence locations (initial, penultimate and final) in comparison with their broad focus counterparts. A total of 3528 utterances were produced by 14 speakers of Makkan Arabic. The results from the production experiment show that (a) prosodic prominence marking was not used, and (b) the number of accent distribution patterns was limited, as was the number of two pitch accent types observed: L+H* and H*. The results from the perception experiment reveal that MA listeners have a strong preference for producing some word orders to encode focus over others. These results contribute to the debate about the interaction between phonology and word order in encoding focus.