F0 peak alignment in Moroccan Arabic polar questions

This paper contributes phonetic evidence to ongoing debate regarding the position of Moroccan Arabic in prosodic typology, with the aim of determining how phrase-edge tonal events should be represented in the intonational phonology of the language. A salient phrase-final rise-fall tonal event, found in MA polar questions, is used as a case study. We examined the alignment of the f0 peak of this tonal movement, relative to potential landmarks in prosodic structure, in a set of 112 polar questions extracted from a corpus of read and spontaneous speech collected in Casablanca. A comparison of f0 peak alignment in tokens containing an unstressable final CV syllable vs. a stressable final CVC syllable suggests that the rise-fall tonal event observed in MA polar questions is best understood as a pitch accent marking prominence at the phrasal level.