Information Structure of Egyptian Arabic

The purpose of this research project is to investigate information structure in Egyptian Arabic (EA), the spoken language of Egypt. The study aims to investigate the interaction between syntax and prosody in encoding information structure from a functional-typological perspective. Being the first in-depth study into the information structure of an Arabic vernacular, the study will hopefully start filling a gap within the area of Arabic language studies and at the same time contribute to the general picture of information structure in the languages of the world from a typological perspective. Thus, this study seeks to conjoin two major research traditions, namely Arabic linguistics and general linguistics. The study will be based on an extensive corpus that combines an extensive body of natural speech data with experimental data consisting of well-controlled production and perception experiments and elicited data from a questionnaire (QUIS) designed for examining information structure (Skopeteas et. al. 2006). Examining information structure will thus rely on the qualitative analysis of the spontaneous speech data and the acoustic analysis of the experimental data from different speakers that is seen as a prerequisite to yield reliable results in the area of prosody. Besides providing the first comprehensive description of information structure in EA, the project will contribute to the discussion of much-debated linguistic questions such as the thetic/categorical distinction, addressing the investigation of the various constraints on theticity in EA, and the definitions of topic and focus as well as the differentiation between various kinds of topics and foci. To achieve these goals, the study will not only identify the different formal correlates of information structural categories such as topic and focus, but also investigate their functions in discourse. A further research question is the issue of contrastiveness as a gradient or categorical phenomenon. In that respect, two major issues involving the notion of contrastiveness will be examined. The first question is whether contrastive focus and information focus are formally distinguished in EA, and the second the problem of whether different instances of contrastivity should rather be captured by a unified account of contrastivity or whether a distinction between contrastive focus and contrastive topic is justified. This last aspect is intimately connected to the question of multiple and embedded categories, such as multiple topics and foci, topic-in-focus and focus-in-topic constructions.