Part of
Prosody and IconicityEdited by Sylvie Hancil and Daniel Hirst
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 13] 2013
► pp. 109–126
Edited by Sylvie Hancil and Daniel Hirst
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 13] 2013
► pp. 109–126
Pragmatic functions and the biological codes
Evidence from the prosody of sentence topic and focus in Egyptian Arabic declaratives
I argue in this paper that the intonational marking of information structure is mainly based on iconic principles relying on the effects of the frequency code (Ohala 1983; Gussenhoven 2002) and the effort code (Gussenhoven 2002). It will be shown that different information structures can be disambiguated, if, in addition to prominence relations, tonal properties are taken into account. Following Lambrecht (1994), I argue for a distinction between pragmatic relations (topic and rhematic focus), which are realized by tonal shape (high/rising or low/falling) and pragmatic properties (focus of interest) realized by prominence. Specifically, it is suggested that deaccenting is only a special case of downtoning, which is also employed in EA to mark presupposed material.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
El Zarka, Dina
2017. Arabic Intonation. In Oxford Handbook Topics in Linguistics, 
Hellmuth, Sam
2016. Exploring the syntax-phonology interface in Arabic. In Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVII [Studies in Arabic Linguistics, 3], ► pp. 75 ff.
Zarka, Dina El & Petra Hödl
2021. A study on the perception of prosodic cues to focus by Egyptian listeners: Some make use of them, but most of them don't. Speech Communication 132 ► pp. 55 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.