Stress and Accent in Tunisian Arabic

Arabic, whether Modern Standard or the various dialects, has a consonant and vowel quantity distinction. Generally, long Arabic vowels are considered twice as long as short ones and length in most Arabic dialects is phonemic. North African Arabic is said to be prone to short vowel deletion in open syllables resulting in various consonant clusters and complex syllabic structure. As far as lexical stress patterns are concerned, the placement of lexical stress varies from standard to the dialect and from one dialect to another, but it is generally fixed stress conditioned by syllabic weight. In Tunisian Arabic (TA), for example, word- level stress falls on the last syllable when it is long and on the penultimate in all other cases (Ghazali, 1973). In certain cases, lexical stress is phonemic in this dialect. The acoustic correlates of word-level stress in TA were thought to be duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency (F0) (Ghazali, 1973). However, due to the confusion in the literature between the terms “stress” and “accent”, the acoustic correlates associated with them have been confounded, too. The present paper reports results of phonetic experiments on the acoustic correlates of “lexical stress ” and “phrasal stress or “accent”, as two separate concepts, in this Arabic dialect. Stress, here, is considered a structural linguistic property that specifies which syllable in the word i