Postgraduate Theses & Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14154/68006
Browse
1 results
Search Results
Item Restricted An Analysis of Intonational Patterns in Qassimi Arabic (QA): An Acoustic Study(Qassim University, 2023-04-27) الجمعان، لمياء عيد مبارك; Aljamaan, Lamya Eid Mubarak; الجطيلي, محمد; Aljutaily, MohammadThe world's languages and dialects depend heavily on intonation for the formation of meaning, and different intonations can convey different ideas or meanings. This thesis employs the autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework to examine the intonational patterns of declarative sentences and yes/no questions as spoken in Qassimi Arabic (QA) to determine the general intonational patterns in this dialect and whether generalizations about them are possible. The participants were 20 Qassimi Arabic speakers aged 20–40 years. Participants were introduced to a story written in QA, followed by two types of sentences (declarative sentence and yes/no question) that they were asked to read. Praat software was used to analyze the data. The findings revealed that, in declarative sentences, QA speakers tended to have a final low boundary tone as L-L%, L%, while in yes/no questions, QA speakers tended to have a final high boundary tone as L-H%, H%, and H-H%. ANOVA analysis confirmed that there were significant differences between the F0 values of the declarative sentences and yes/no questions, such that the F0 of yes/no questions had higher values than the declarative forms in all participants regardless of their gender. These findings are similar to those in many studies of Arabic varieties, including ones of Farasani Arabic, Hijazi Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Lebanese Arabic. However, there were some unexpected patterns in the results as well. First, in declarative sentences, some statements ended with high tone, as H%, L-H%, while others showed a rising intonation and then a lowering tone, as in H*+L%, and H-L%. Second, in yes/no questions, the unexpected intonational patterns were H-L%, L-L%, and L%. These unexpected patterns occurred because participants read the stimulus as if they were reading a paper or were accidental and unrepeated. Nevertheless, these unexpected patterns were not frequent, which is why two repetitions were implemented to ensure that the results were not produced by accident.72 0