Karim Shoul

Laboratoire de phonétique et phnologie UMR 7018, CNRS, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France

1. spoken communication and phonetics

Emphasis and Glottalization: Are emphatics glottalized in Moroccan Arabic?

Some linguists (Heath 1987 among others) believe that emphatics are produced with glottalization since their articulation is accompanied by a secondary back articulation in the pharynx. We tried to see whether emphasis is accompanied by glottalization in Morrocan Arabic (Hereafter MA). To do so we took into consideration some acoustic elements such as the acoustic signal and the fundamental frequency (F0) in addition to laryngographic data. Emphatics were represented in this work by the stop /t/ and its corresponding emphatic /t9/. Both of consonants were studied in the sequences /Cab/, /aCa/ and where C is /t/ or /t9/. Acoustic results showed that the vowels neighbouring both of consonants in the three sequences were produced with the same regular acoustic signal and the same values of F0. This indicates the absence of glottalization. Otherwise we would get irregular realisation of the acoustic signal and lower values of F0 (Dilley et al. 1996, Pierrehumbert 1992) for the vowels following the emphatic stop. Laryngographic results confirmed the absence of glottalization for the emphatic. Through the laryngographic signal (Fourcin 1974) we found that the closing and the opening of the vocal folds are the same for the vowels following the emphatic and the non emphatic stops. In other words, the vowels were produced with a closing phase which has the shortest duration, followed by the open phase, and the opening phase with the longest duration.