On the Acoustics of Emphasis in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese

Abstract This paper presents a study of emphasis in an attempt to determine its acoustic correlates in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese Arabic (CMLL), an urban colloquial variety of Arabic spoken in Lebanon. Several analyses of emphasis exist in the literature, which largely focus on neighbouring vowels and either investigate, or make use of, a link between F2 lowering and emphasis. This study, based on acoustic data from 11 speakers, considers various possible consonantal as well as vocalic correlates. The vocalic analyses make use of statistical modelling in linear mixed effects, and generalised additive mixed modelling. This study finds significant F2 lowering in vowels preceding the emphatic voiceless sibilant /ṣ/. It argues that, in terms of the acoustics, emphasis is a vocalic rather than consonantal phenomenon, and that, in CMLL, the phonological feature ‘emphasis’ is consonantal, but is realized phonetically as a colouration of the adjacent vowels.