IVA’09 Conference – York University, UK
A Phonetic Delineation of Pragmatic Features in Male Bedouin Narratives
Judith Rosenhouse, Haifa
Abstract
The study of Arabic intonation is one of the interesting topics of Arabic phonetics that
have been developing since the 20th century (see Chahal, 2007). Colloquial Arabic
intonation patterns differ among the numerous dialects especially, but not only, between
Western and Eastern ones (see e.g., Benkirane, 1998, Chahal, 2007, Barkat, 2004, on this
topic). This paper focuses on the intonation of a specific group of speakers, namely male
Bedouins, and of a specific genre, namely male stories.
The study is based on the natural speech of several recorded male Bedouin stories
published on the SemArch internet site. They were chosen for complete analysis due to
their length (per story). Unlike many laboratory experiments, the topics and internal
structure of these stories differ from one another and each speaker has his own style and
pitch modulations. But they belong to one genre: that of male Bedouin narrators.
We selected four stories narrated by four different speakers from different tribes and
countries (Jordan, Iraq and Israel) for detailed study. This number of stories is not large,
but we also surveyed several other stories found in the mentioned database of SemArch.
Due to the length of the selected stories and the fact that they belong to the same genre, it
was possible to find several basic common features that reflect the pragmatic use of
intonation in this genre of natural speech.
The studied stories were not new to the speakers, nor to at least part of the audience, and
did not refer to the narrators' personal experience. From this point of view they can be
considered semi-spontaneous. Few utterances expressed basic emotions (such as joy,
sorrow, or fear), which are a major topic within the study of the intonation of emotion in
the literature (see, e.g., Poyaots, 1993, Tatham and Morton, 2004). However, the
narrators’ involvement and personal attitude could be identified in many parts of stories.
We classified the stories into speech units by pragmatic-syntactic-semantic-phonetic
categories on two levels: narrative and modal intonation units, as a general classification,
and comments, exclamations and commands on the more detailed structural level. The
latter reflect semantic-syntactic categories which involve the narrator's attitudes to the
narrative. The former are less “personal.” These speech types are demonstrated in the
talk. For the acoustic structure of intonation (F0) on which we focus we used Praat.
A part of the findings of this examination, i.e., the modal and narrative intonation units,
were statistically analyzed. Results of the modal and narrative patterns indicated
differences between speakers and within speakers. Inter-speaker differences would be
expected due to physiological differences. But the intra-speaker differences indicate
differences between studied defined semantic-syntactic groups of intonation units or
speech-modes. In the modal and narrative speech modes the results of the pitch data
analysis explain approximately 34% of the pitch of intra-speaker differences. This
suggests that our classification reflects different pitch structures in these speech modes,
and is justified. It is highly likely that other phonetic features of intensity and duration
provide further explanation of differences between the speech modes and deserve
separate study.
Acknowledgment
The study of this topic was begun at the University of Trier, Germany (2007) under a
grant of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
References
Barkat, M., R. Hamdi and F. Pellegrino (2004) “De la caractérisation linguistique à
l’identification automatique des dialectes arabes”, MIDL Paris November, 2004.
Chahal, D. (2007) “Intonation” in: K. Versteegh and others (eds.), Encyclopedia of
Arabic Language and Linguistics, Leiden: Brill, Vol. 2: 395-401.
Benkirane, T. (1998) “Intonation in Western Arabic (Morocco)”, in: D. Hirst and A. Di
Cristo (eds.) Intonation systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 345-359
Poyatos (1993) Paralanguage: a linguistic and interdisciplinary appproach to interactive
speech and sound, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Tatham, M. and K. Morton (2004) Expression in speech: Analysis and Synthesis, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.