title: Phonetics of emphasis in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese: acoustics, perception, articulation
title: The phonetics of emphasis in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese: acoustics, perception, articulation
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Sakr, Georges
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Lebanese
subject: emphatic consonants
subject: descriptive phonetics
subject: phonetic methodology
subject: statistical modeling

description: This thesis is a descriptive analysis of the phonetics of emphasis in the variety of Lebanese spoken in Central Mount Lebanon (CMLL). It is both empirically and methodologically motivated, and bases its discussions around acoustic, perceptual, and articulatory data, collected from native speakers for the purposes of this thesis. The background chapters frame the variety and the phenomenon in their contexts, the data chapters dive into the experimental studies that make up the methodological core of this project, and the discussion frames the results of the different experimental approaches in relation to one another. The acoustic study uses production data from 11 participants, recorded in Central Mount Lebanon. It finds no purely consonantal correlate to emphasis, and no statistically significant evidence towards the widely-reported F2 lowering correlate of emphasis, at vowel midpoint, across all vocalic contexts. The vowel midpoint analysis (using linear mixed models) only shows significant lowering of F2 for schwa and for long low vowels, the latter of which I report in my 2019 MScR dissertation to be categorically split into front and back low vowels with emphasis having a backing effect on the front category (/æ, ɑ/ → [ɑ] / [+EMPH]). The dynamic analysis (using univariate generalised additive mixed models) only finds a statistically significant lowering of F2 in the pre-emphatic voiceless sibilant context (_ṣ) for the low vowel, while the F2 lowering shown in other phonological contexts cannot be shown to be significant with this data. An early version of this study was published in the Journal of Semitic Studies in 2023. The perceptual study is based on a lexical decision task given to 60 native speakers in Central Mount Lebanon. They were asked to determine whether the recording they heard matched an image associated with the plain or the emphatic member of a minimal pair. The recordings consisted of each of the original words (eg. /sīn/ versus /ṣīn/), a cross-splice of an emphatic- adjacent vowel from the word with an emphatic into the word without (eg. the /ī/ from /ṣīn/ spliced into /s_n/), and a cross-splice of the vowel in the same position from the word without the emphatic into the word with (eg. the /ī/ from /sīn/ spliced into /ṣ_n/). Using logistic regression analysis, the study finds that listeners rely on the consonant to detect emphasis in most cases, but that they instead rely on the vowel before the voiceless sibilant, in unrounded vowels after the alveolar plosives, and in unrounded vowels before the voiced alveolar plosive. As an aside, the study also shows that the emphatic-plain contrast in voiced alveolar fricatives (/ẓ/ versus /z/), while phonemic, is lexically less prominent than other such contrasts in CMLL. The articulatory study uses ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) data, recorded from 5 speakers of Lebanese living in Edinburgh. It explores the use of multivariate generalised additive mixed models, then dives into kinematic analyses. The data used in the study consists of CVb nonce syllables, setting the target emphatics and their unemphatic counterparts in the onset, with a voiced bilabial in the coda. It finds that there is a difference between the articulation of emphatic consonants and plain consonants. The difference in articulation occurs at the level of the pharynx, at consonant offset. The data does however suggest that the difference in articulation— this back, second constriction— occurs either further forward in the oral tract towards the uvula or velum at consonant offset, or at the pharynx earlier back in time before consonant offset, if the immediately subsequent vowel is frontal. The discussion, grounded in theories of co-articulation, brings together the results of the three experiments, with a view to interpreting how the phonological phenomenon of emphasis operates on a phonetic level, and how the findings of three complementary experimental phonetic approaches can inform our understanding of a complex phonological phenomenon.