The effect of social factors on emphatic-plain contrast in Jordan: a sociphonetic study of arabic in Amman City

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Title The effect of social factors on emphatic-plain contrast in Jordan: a sociphonetic study of arabic in Amman City
Publication Type dissertation
School or College College of Humanities
Department Linguistics
Author Azoubi, Abdulaziz Ahmad Salih
Date 2017
Description Arabic has a set of sounds called emphatics that contrast with their plain counterparts in secondary articulation. Previous research has indicated the presence of socially conditioned variation, realized in the consonants themselves and adjacent vowels. However, these investigations, have been limited by methodological problems in subjects' recruitment and data elicitation procedures, which may have resulted in contradictory conclusions about the acoustics of emphasis and their social dimension. The present study explored the acoustics of emphatics and the social dimension of acoustic variation in emphasis production in Amman, the capital of Jordan. The study investigated the effect of extralinguistic variables, such as gender, social class, and origin of the speaker. The study focused on the acoustic cues of two emphatic phonemes, the alveolar fricative /sˤ/ and the alveolar stop /tˤ/ and their plain counterparts /s/ and /t/. The acoustic analysis examined the Center of Gravity of the stops and fricatives, Voice Onset Time of stops, and the formant frequencies of vowels adjacent to target sounds. As the results of the study point to gender, social class, and the original dialect of the speaker as important sources of variation in emphasis, they provide strong argument for the inclusion of social class and original regional dialect in the sociophonetic inquiry of Arabic in Jordan.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Sociolinguistics; Social Sciences; Jordanian Arabic; Sociolinguistics; Sociophonetics; Arabic language; Vowels; Frequency (Acoustics); Phonemes; Stops; Regional dialects; Voice onset time (VOT); Social factors; Articulation; Cues/Cueing; Fricatives; Social classes; Acoustic analysis
Dissertation Name Doctor of Phiosophy
Language eng
Rights Management © Abdulaziz Ahmad Salih Alzoubi
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
ARK ark:/87278/s6mp9cs8
Setname ir_etd
ID 1381003
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6mp9cs8
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