A perceptual analysis of phrasal stress in Amazigh

In the last few years, a number of research studies have been conducted on stress in Amazigh, a Hamito-Semitic language spoken in North Africa. However, these works were mainly confined to analysing word-level stress. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to examine stress distribution beyond this level, namely within the phrase and the sentence in Goulmima Amazigh. Specifically, an attempt is made to investigate whether the stress patterns of isolated words are similar or distinct from those of items that appear within phrases or sentences. Results of the study revealed that the assignment of stress at the phrasal and sentence levels shows marked differences from the assignment of stress at the word level. In fact, stress above the word level no longer depends on the internal make-up of the syllable. Apart from nominal forms that occupy the initial position of a phrase or sentence, those that are part of each of these strings get stressed on the rightmost syllable whose nucleus is a plain vowel. Nonetheless, only the last stressed syllable in the sequence bears more prominence.