AFR vs. FR tendency to use the expected gaʿya

My research disagrees with this claim that, compared to FR disjunctives, AFR disjunctives show only slightly less tendency to use the expected gaʿya. Of course it is hard to quantitatively define what “slightly” means, but for any reasonable definition, my research disagrees with this claim. To be fair to ITM, we should exclude AFR2 and AFR3 from the broader claim about AFR words in general. We should exclude them for the following reasons:

• For pattern AFR2, ITM warns that the number of exceptions is “much greater” than among FR words.
• For pattern AFR3, ITM gives the even stronger warning that gaʿya is “generally not marked,” even underlining that phrase.

In light of these warnings, it is odd that ITM makes this broad claim about AFR words. We shall give ITM the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it meant to make a less-broad claim that included only AFR1 and AFR4.

While I find that about 6% of FR disjunctives (130 out of 2174) lack the expected gaʿya, I find the following for AFR1 and AFR4:

• I find that about 19% of AFR1 disjunctives (20 out of 106) lack the expected gaʿya. Although this shows that AFR1 shares FR1’s tendency to use the expected gaʿya, it shows that AFR1 has more than slightly less of this tendency.
• I find that about 60% of AFR4 disjunctives (63 out of 105) lack the expected gaʿya. This is just plain inconsistent with the claim made by ITM. This is a disagreement in kind rather than degree. Since I find that more than half of the disjunctives lack the expected gaʿya, I could say that AFR4 has a mild tendency to not use the expected gaʿya on disjunctives!

I need to do further research to understand these discrepancies between my results and the claims in ITM. In a long footnote in #320 I include many possible sources of such discrepancies.

Finally, I should note that I have assumed that ITM’s claim is about the expected gaʿya on disjunctives, but, technically, the claim is not restricted to disjunctives. The claim is, literally: “Words in this category [(AFR)] show slightly less tendency to[wards] the use of gaʿya than words with fully regular structure.” If I test an accent-ignoring version of this claim, I find that about 63% of FR words have the gaʿya expected mainly on disjunctives, about the same (65%) is true for AFR1, and AFR4 is once again wildly different, with only about 32% of words having that gaʿya. (I decline to go so far as to assess a version of this claim in which we also ignore where the gaʿya appears, although, technically, the claim is not restricted to the gaʿya on the main part of the syllable that is two before the stress.)