Prosodic Disambiguation of Disjunctive Declaratives and Disjunctive Questions in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract This study investigates phonological and phonetic details of disjunctive declaratives (ddcls) and alternative questions (altqs) in Arabic. The aim of the phonological and phonetic analyses of these syntactically identical utterances is to find out the cues that are responsible for the disambiguation. Consequently, a production study eliciting ddcls and altqs was run with 20 participants producing 160 utterances (80 ddcls and 80 altqs). Findings reveal that ddcls and altqs are similar in having a global rise-fall contour, but differ in the phonetic implementation of the fall, since minimum F0 values are significantly higher in altqs than in ddcls, suggesting that there is a fall to mid in the former (proposing !H%) and a fall to low in the latter (L%). There are also significant phonological differences in the accentual features between both sentence types, i.e., the conjuncts are always accented in altqs, but they are deaccented in ddcls. The findings are a contribution to the prosody-meaning literature, showing the importance of prosody for syntactic disambiguation. The findings are used to propose a theory for the disambiguation of disjunctive sentences.