The Role of Intonation in Disambiguating Meanings: A Phonological Study of American and Arabic Political Speeches
Abstract
In any spoken language, intonation is a common phenomenon that can be thought of as verbal punctuation. It facilitates understanding that goes beyond what words alone can express. Up until now, this suprasegmental feature has been the subject of formal and functional research. The aim of this paper is: firstly, identify the role of intonation in disambiguating meanings in English political speeches with reference to that in Arabic; and secondly, understand the types of ambiguities and analyse types of intonations that play vital roles in resolving ambiguities in both languages. The data for the case study are taken randomly from presidential speeches, specifically, from the presidents of the USA ‘ Donald Trump and Joe Biden’; whereas the Arabic data are taken from ‘Nouri Al Maliki and Abdul Fattah el-Sisi’. These data have been analyzed at three levels of intonation ‘ fall, rise, rise-fall’ according to J.C. Wells (2006), notation system
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