Open AccessDisambiguating cues of disjunctive questions
Author(s) -
Mohammad Bani Younes,
Sam Hellmuth
Publication year - 2020
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
DOI - 10.36505/exling-2020/11/0010/000425
Subject(s) - intonation (linguistics) , perception , arabic , linguistics , logistic regression , natural language processing , computer science , artificial intelligence , psychology , machine learning , philosophy , neuroscience
This paper aims to find out the similarities and differences between Jordanian (JA), Egyptian (EA), and Kuwaiti (KA) Arabic in which cues disambiguate alternative questions (altqs) and disjunctive yes-no questions (dynqs): intonation contour and choice of disjunctive element (DE). A perception study was run in the three dialects, replicating Pruitt & Roelofsen’s (2013) perception study on English. Mixed-effects logistic regression was used to explore the results which revealed all dialects show a main effect of both intonation and DE choice; a rise contour and use of ʔaw significantly increased the likelihood of dynq responses. The effect of intonation was larger than that of DE choice in all dialects. The differences between the dialects lay in the relative strength of the DE coefficients.