The Persian pitch accent and its retention after the focus

Abstract

Abstract Persian words have prominence on the last syllable. Right-edge clitics fall outside this word domain, and segmentally identical words and word-plus-clitic combinations therefore contrast for the location of the prominence. Two experiments were conducted to answer two questions. A production experiment addressed the question whether any phonetic cues other than f0 signal this prominence contrast. We found small phonetic differences between members of minimal pairs outside the more evident f0 differences, but attribute these to side effects of pitch accent placement. The second question was whether post-focal words undergo deaccentuation, as evidenced by neutralization of the contrast between post-focal words and word-plus-clitic combinations. Both the production experiment and a perception experiment showed that there is Post Focus Compression, since pitch excursions in the post-focal speech were considerably reduced, both in interrogative and in declarative utterances, as compared to other positions in the sentence. However, no neutralization occurred. We tentatively conclude that Persian word prominences are pitch accents and that words are not deaccented when the pitch range is reduced after the focus