Two experiments were carried out to examine whether the Persian word accent is deleted in two putative deaccenting contexts, post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, to the extent that accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed words, while a perception experiment showed that such words are not recognized above a just-noticeable-difference baseline. The results confirm that accents are deleted in the contexts concerned and that accent location contrasts are neutralized.
A claim about Persian prosody that has frequently been made is that the word prominence disappears after the focus constituent (
Although Persian word prominence has been described as “word stress” (e.g.,
Persian morphological words are accented on the final syllable without exception. By morphological word (henceforth
Three
(1)
a.
doxtar
(dox.tár)
girl
b.
doxtar-une
(dox.ta.ru.né)
girl-
‘girlish’
c.
doxtar+amme
(dox.tar)(am.mé)
girl+aunt
‘cousin’
The position of the accent in a Persian
The final accent pattern is not affected by the length and internal complexity of the
Before moving on, a remark should be made about two types of syllabification in Persian. Obligatory syllabification takes place in the
The location of accent has been generally recognized as highly contrastive in Persian, in that it contributes to distinguishing between morphosyntactically different utterances (
Crucially, since clitics, unlike suffixes, fall outside the morphological domain of the host, they are not assigned accent, causing the accent on the
The functional load of accentual contrast associated with clitics is extremely high at the level of
(2) | a. | vɒnet | vɒn=et |
(vɒ.nét) | (vɒ́.net) | ||
pickup | bathtub= |
||
‘your bathtub’ | |||
b. | xub-i | xub=i | |
(xu.bí) | (xú.bi) | ||
good- |
good= |
||
‘goodness’ | ‘you are good’ |
Given that accentual contrasts of the sort just described arise from a difference in morphosyntactic structure, there are potentially countless numbers of minimal pairs of
In the second type of minimal pairs, the two members are both
(3) | a. | xɒle=am → xɒlam | xɒl=am |
(xɒ.lám) | (xɒ́.lam) | ||
aunt= |
mole= |
||
‘my aunt’ | ‘my mole’ | ||
b. | bord-e=am → bordam | bord=am | |
(bor.dám) | (bór.dam) | ||
took- |
took=1 |
||
‘I have taken’ | ‘I took’ |
The pair in (3b) illustrates the contrast between past and perfect verb forms. Since the perfect form consists of the past stem plus the participle suffix [-e] plus the personal clitic, all perfect forms minimally contrast with past forms which consist of past stem plus the personal clitic. Thus, these two verb systems are only distinct by the accent in colloquial Persian.
Accentual minimal pairs are also highly frequent at the clause level, for instance due to the status of compounds as single
(4)
a.
fɒrsi
(fɒr.sí)
zabɒn=ast.
(za.bɒ́.nast)
Persian language=
‘Persian is a language.’
[[N]NP [[N]NP V]VP]S
b.
fɒrsi+zabɒn=ast.
(fɒr.si)(za.bɒ́.nast)
Persian+language=
‘S/he is a speaker of Persian.’
[[[N+N]NP V]VP]S
Significantly, despite this extremely high functional load of accent location, Persian listeners have been found to be
In our experiment, we will use both types of minimal pairs that are formed at the level of
As in many languages, the variation in the focus of the sentence has intonational effects in Persian. Any
(5)
ɒlmɒn
Germany
junɒn=o
Greece=
bord.
beat.3
‘Germany beat Greece.’
a. | What happened? | [ɒlmɒn junɒn=o bord] |
|
b. | Who beat Greece? | [ɒlmɒn] |
|
c. | Who did Germany beat? | ɒlmɒn [junɒn] |
|
d. | What did Germany do to Greece? | ɒlmɒn junɒn=o [bord] |
|
e. | Who beat whom? | [ɒlmɒn] |
Figure
F0 contours, plotted below the associated waveforms, for the SOV structure [ɒlmɒn junɒno bord] ‘Germany beat Greece’, spoken by a male speaker in response to
The F0-lowering effect on the post-focal constituents is so significant that many researchers on the topic have claimed that the post-focal materials lose their accent to the extent that minimal accent pairs become homophonous (e.g.,
Another point evident from Figure
The minimal constituent for intonational marking of focus is the
(6)
a.
[fɒrsi+zabɒn]
(fɒr.si)(za.bɒ́n)
Persian+language
‘speaker of Persian’
b.
[fɒrsi]
(fɒr.si)(za.bɒ́n)
c.
fɒrsi+[zabɒn]
(fɒr.si)(za.bɒ́n)
The fact that Persian does not allow accentuation of the first constituent of a compound is not surprising given the status of accent as a morphosyntactic boundary marker, as shown for the noun+noun sequence [fɒrsi+zabɒn] (Persian+language) in (4). Thus, while [fɒrsí zabɒn ast] is an appropriate answer to the question
In addition to the possible phonetic effects of focus size, there have been two further distinctions that have been considered as sources of systematic phonetic variation. First, it has been noted that focused constituents have a relatively high F0 (e.g.,
Persian has certain constructions that are semantically related to focus and which have similar intonational effects. Scarborough (
Scarborough observed two intonation patterns in the pronunciation of sentences containing complement clauses, exemplified in (7), where complement clauses are in brackets. Persian clausal complements, which appear in post-verbal position, may be introduced by the morpheme [ke].
(7)
a.
mɒdarbozórg
Grandmother
mídune
[(ke)
that
ɒnɒnɒse
pineapple.
reside].
ripen.
‘Grandmother knows that the pineapple has ripened.’
b.
mɒdarbozórg
grandmother
migé
[(ke)
that
ɒnɒnɒsé
pineapple.
residé].
ripen.
‘Grandmother says that the pineapple has ripened.’
The author argues that while (7b) follows the neutral intonation of Persian declaratives in the sense that all
The semantic contrast between the main verbs in (7a) and (7b) may remind us of a traditional distinction between two classes of clause-taking verbs, factives (e.g.,
We will refer to deaccented clausal complements of factive verbs as
(8)
mídunam
[ɒlmɒ́n
Germany
junɒ́n=o
Greece=
bórd].
beat.3
‘I know (that) Germany beat Greece.’
Crucially, the main verb [midunam] does not merely express factivity, but is used to indicate that the information in the complement clause is only a partial answer to the question, a meaning which has been categorized as
“I am not in a position to give a full answer to your question. But here is a relevant fact which I do know: Germany beat Greece.”
A syntactic correlate of the distinction between the non-exhaustive complement clause (8) and the presupposed one in (7a) is that only the non-exhaustive one allows preposing, as illustrated in (9).
(9) | [ɒlmɒ́n junɒ́n=o bórd] midunam. |
‘Germany beat Greece, I know.’ |
These observations are of practical relevance to our experiment. The fact that clausal complements of factive verbs can be accented as well as deaccented depending on the meaning makes them suitable as stimuli in our experiment.
Abolhasanizadeh et al. (
(10)
a.
[un]
that
tɒbéʃ=e.
Tabesh=
‘That is Tabesh.’
b.
[un]
that
tɒ́b=eʃ=e.
loll swing=
‘That is his/her loll swing.’
Our interest in the present study is to reconsider this issue. We believe that the validity of the data used by Abolhasanizadeh et al. (
In order to place the investigation in a wider perspective, we decided to include different putative deaccenting contexts in our corpus. As target items, we used two minimal pairs with different morphological structures. The target minimal pairs were each examined in the context of the two types of information structural configurations, namely contrastive focus and factive verb construction described above in Subsections 1.3 and 1.4.
We conducted a production experiment to gather phonetic data on the realization of accentual contrasts in Persian. The strategy of the experiment was to have speakers pronounce a set of pre-designed sentences in different information structure contexts. In the current study, we are only concerned with measures of fundamental frequency (F0).
We built up a corpus of sentences featuring two minimal pairs as target items, given in Table
The minimal pairs as target items used in the experiment.
First member |
Second member |
|
---|---|---|
1st pair | tɒ́b=eʃ |
tɒbéʃ |
2nd pair | díd=an |
did-án |
We constructed four carrier sentence structures, each corresponding to one of the possible combinations of the two minimal pairs ([tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ], [dídan/didán]) and the two information structural configurations (contrastive focus, factive verb construction). The carrier sentences were designed in such a way that they provide the minimal context required to cover all experimental conditions in which they were used. Table
The structure of the corpus used in the experiment.
Information structural configuration | Target pair | Carrier sentence (X denotes the target word) |
---|---|---|
Contrastive focus |
[tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ] |
|
Contrastive focus |
[dídan/didán] |
|
Factive verb construction |
[tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ] |
|
Factive verb construction |
[dídan/didán] |
Within the carrier sentences, the target items had a cliticized form, i.e.
To elicit the desired experimental conditions, carrier sentences were preceded by a context sentence, with which they formed mini-dialogues. This resulted in 12 mini-dialogues for focus and eight mini-dialogues for factive construction (see Table
English translations of the mini-dialogues that were used to elicit experimental conditions for the target item [tɒbéʃ].
Contrastive focus | Neutral | A: What happened? |
Focal | A: Is that Ahmadi? |
|
Post-focal | A: Is this Tabesh? |
|
Factive verb construction | Non-presupposed | A: Have you heard about the new teacher? |
Presupposed | A: He says his name is Tabesh but I don’t think so. |
Eight speakers took part in the experiment, four male and four female, aged from 27 to 37. They were native speakers of Standard Persian, all with university education. Informed consent was obtained from each participant.
The dialogues were presented to the speakers in two experimental blocks. One block consisted of materials related to contrastive focus, while the materials related to factive verb construction were put in the other block. The order of blocks and of test dialogues within each block was randomized per speaker in order to control for presentation order. Each block was presented to the speakers in the form of a booklet with one dialogue per page in Persian orthography.
Before the recording of each block, speakers were given an opportunity to try out the example dialogues by listening to the sound files played from a laptop and pronouncing the target sentence, for as long as they wished. In general, the speakers found the task clear and easy and quickly moved on from the trial.
Unlike previous studies which used bold letters for focused items (e.g.,
The speakers were recorded individually in the studio of the Linguistics Department of the University of Tehran using a Shure SM58 vocal cardioids microphone (44.1 kHz, mono channel, 16-bit). For analysis, one recording was randomly selected from the utterances of each sentence by each speaker which resulted in 20 response utterances per speaker overall.
We report general observations on the effects of information structure on the realization of accentual contrasts based on visual inspection of time-normalized averaged F0 curves pooled over all eight speakers, followed by statistical evaluation with analysis of variance for repeated measures (rmANOVA). A Praat script was used to carry out the measurements and to correct pitch errors resulting from creaky voice or octave jumps (
F0 measurements for initial accent and final accent target items will be reported separately for each of the four parts of the corpus given in Table
Mean F0 contours for [un tɒbeʃe] on a normalized time scale for initial accent and final accent items separately, with target items in neutral pronunciation (panel (a)), in focal pronunciation (panel (b)), and post-focal pronunciation (panel (c)), pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz).
Mean F0 contours for [unɒ didaneʃ] on a normalized time scale for initial accent and final accent items separately, with target items in neutral pronunciation (panel (a)), in focal pronunciation (panel (b)), and post-focal pronunciation (panel (c)), pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz).
Mean F0 contours for [midunam tɒbeʃe] on a normalized time scale for initial accent and final accent items separately, with target items in non-presupposed pronunciation of the embedded clause (panel (a)), and presupposed pronunciation of the embedded clause (panel (b)), pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz).
Mean F0 contours for [midunam didaneʃ] on a normalized time scale for initial accent and final accent items separately, with target items in non-presupposed pronunciation of the embedded clause (panel (a)), and presupposed pronunciation of the embedded clause (panel (b)), pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz).
We turn to the results for focus first. Panels (a) in Figures
Turning to the effect of factive verb construction, we observe a similar pattern of deaccentuation for both minimal pairs. While a considerable F0 difference exists between the members of each minimal pair in the non-presupposed condition (panels (a) in Figures
In order to find statistical evidence for these results, we conducted eight repeated measures ANOVAs. Each of these included data from either the first or the second syllable of the members of a minimal pair from either the focus or the factive part of the experiment, i.e. 2 minimal pairs × 2 syllable positions × 2 information structure constructions. The independent variables were information structure (neutral, focal, post-focal for contrastive focus; non-presupposed, presupposed for factive verb construction) and accent position (initial accent, final accent). The dependent variable was the mean over the six F0 values extracted from the second half of each syllable. This limitation was applied so as to minimize carryover effects of preceding syllables. The analyses are reported in Tables
ANOVA summary of the effects of contrastive focus and accent position on F0 measures of the 2nd half of the syllable [tɒ] and the 2nd half of the syllable [be] of the sequence [tɒbeʃe]. IS: information structure; AP: accent position.* indicates a significant effect at the 5% level, Huynh-Feldt corrected where appropriate.
Effects | Partial η2 | Post-hoc comparison, Sidak’s |
||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[tɒ] | IS | <.001 | .944 | |||
Neutral vs. Focal | .148 | |||||
Neutral vs. Post-focal | <.001 | * | ||||
Focal vs. Post-focal | <.001 | * | ||||
AP | <.001 | .868 | ||||
IS × AP | <.001 | .821 | ||||
[be] | IS | <.001 | .775 | |||
Neutral vs. Focal | .911 | |||||
Neutral vs. Post-focal | .004 | * | ||||
Focal vs. Post-focal | .004 | * | ||||
AP | <.001 | .951 | ||||
IS × AP | <.001 | .806 |
ANOVA summary of the effects of contrastive focus and accent position on F0 measures of the 2nd half of the syllable [di] and the 2nd half of the syllable [da] of the sequence [didaneʃ]. IS: information structure; AP: accent position.* indicates a significant effect at the 5% level, Huynh-Feldt corrected where appropriate.
Effects | Partial η2 | Post-hoc comparison, Sidak’s |
||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
[di] | IS | <.001 | .935 | |||
Neutral vs. Focal | .581 | |||||
Neutral vs. Post-focal | <.001 | * | ||||
Focal vs. Post-focal | <.001 | * | ||||
AP | <.001 | .872 | ||||
IS × AP | <.001 | .721 | ||||
[da] | IS | <.001 | .666 | |||
Neutral vs. Focal | .656 | |||||
Neutral vs. Post-focal | .006 | * | ||||
Focal vs. post-Focal | .028 | * | ||||
AP | <.001 | .898 | ||||
IS × AP | <.001 | .728 |
ANOVA summary of the effects of factive verb construction and accent position on F0 measures of the 2nd half of the syllable [tɒ] and the 2nd half of the syllable [be] of the sequence [tɒbeʃe]. IS: information structure; AP: accent position.* indicates a significant effect at the 5% level, Huynh-Feldt corrected where appropriate.
Effects | Partial η2 | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
[tɒ] | IS | <.001 | .925 | |
AP | <.001 | .892 | ||
IS × AP | .002 | .779 | ||
[be] | IS | .001 | .822 | |
AP | <.001 | .899 | ||
IS × AP | <.001 | .882 |
ANOVA summary of the effects of factive verb construction and accent position on F0 measures of the 2nd half of the syllable [di] and the 2nd half of the syllable [da] of the sequence [didaneʃ]. IS: information structure; AP: accent position.* indicates a significant effect at the 5% level, Huynh-Feldt corrected where appropriate.
Effects | Partial η2 | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
[di] | IS | <.001 | .949 | |
AP | .002 | .784 | ||
IS × AP | <.001 | .847 | ||
[da] | IS | .002 | .754 | |
AP | <.001 | .865 | ||
IS × AP | <.001 | .926 |
Mean F0 values of the 2nd half of the syllable [tɒ] (panel (a)) and 2nd half of the syllable [be] (panel(b)) for initial accent and final accent items within the carrier structure [tɒbeʃe] in neutral, focal and post-focal conditions of contrastive focus, pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
Mean F0 values of the 2nd half of the syllable [di] (panel (a)) and 2nd half of the syllable [da] (panel(b)) for initial accent and final accent items within the carrier structure [didaneʃ] in neutral, focal and post-focal conditions of contrastive focus, pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
Mean F0 values of the 2nd half of the syllable [tɒ] (panel (a)) and 2nd half of the syllable [be] (panel (b)) for initial accent and final accent items within the carrier structure [tɒbeʃe] in non-presupposed and presupposed conditions of factive verb construction, pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
Mean F0 values of the 2nd half of the syllable [di] (panel (a)) and 2nd half of the syllable [da] (panel (b)) for initial accent and final accent items within the carrier structure [didaneʃ] in non-presupposed and presupposed conditions of factive verb construction, pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz). Error bars represent standard error of the mean.
In all analyses, the main effects of accent position and information structure were found to be significant (with an alpha level set to 0.05) with large effect sizes. Overall, first, accented syllables of target items have significantly higher F0 than unaccented ones, and, second, F0 is significantly lower in post-focal and presupposed target items than in the other conditions. Moreover, all ANOVAs revealed significant interactions of information structure and accent position with relatively large effect sizes, due to the fact that the F0 difference between accented and unaccented syllables is not significant in post-focal and presupposed conditions. These results confirm the expectation expressed above.
The results of Experiment I suggested that the tonal distinctions between the members of the accentual minimal pairs are lost in the post-focal condition of contrastive focus and in the presupposed condition of factive verb construction. To verify this observation, a perception experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that the members of our minimal pairs are homophonous in these post-focal and presupposed conditions.
All response sentences analyzed in Experiment I were included in the corpus of Experiment II. The utterances were divided into two blocks, one of which contained sentences related to contrastive focus, and the other contained sentences related to factive verb construction. This resulted in 160 stimuli. The design is given in Table
The experimental structure of the perception test.
Contrastive focus | 8 (speakers) × 2 (minimal pairs) × 2 (accent positions) × 3 (information structure conditions) = 96 stimuli |
Factive verb | 8 (speakers) × 2 (minimal pairs) × 2 (accent positions) × 2 (information structure conditions) = 64 stimuli |
A total of 21 listeners, different from the speakers in Experiment I, were recruited, 11 male and 10 female, aged from 17 to 45. They were native speakers of standard Persian, all of whom had obtained a university degree. None of them reported hearing problems and informed consent was obtained from each of them.
The experimental task was presented with a Praat Multiple Forced Choice interface on a laptop (
Within each block, the order of the stimuli was randomized per listener, while the order of blocks was counterbalanced across the listeners. Before the test, listeners were given eight trial stimuli to familiarize themselves with the task. These were selected from the neutral and non-presupposed conditions, in which the target items were accented, so as to facilitate their recognition. All participants indicated that they thought the task was clear to them. They were told that during the experiment they could listen to each stimulus as often as they wished, but that once they had made their choice, it could not be changed.
Participants were tested in different places in Tehran: ten in their home, four in libraries and eight in the studio of the Linguistics Department of the University of Tehran.
In our analysis, a response was considered correct if the listener identified the item that the speaker in the production experiment was supposed to produce. To obtain a quantitative measure of correct identification, we used
(11) |
The maximum possible
We report averaged
Mean
Mean
For contrastive focus, the analysis revealed highly significant effects of minimal pair
As for factive verb construction, we again found significant effects of minimal pair
Finally, we used one-sample
Summary of the identification task.
Minimal pair | Information structure configuration | Experimental conditions | Successful Identification by the listeners? |
---|---|---|---|
[tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ] | Contrastive focus | Neutral | Yes |
Focal | Yes | ||
Post-focal | No | ||
Factive verb construction | Non-presupposed | Yes | |
Presupposed | No | ||
[dídan/didán] | Contrastive focus | Neutral | No |
Focal | No | ||
Post-focal | No | ||
Factive verb construction | Non-presupposed | No | |
Presupposed | No |
Our finding that the identification scores in the post-focal condition are significantly lower than those in the neutral and the focal conditions is consistent with the perception data presented in Abolhasanizadeh et al. (
The results of Experiment I and Experiment II thus converge to suggest that accentual contrasts are neutralized in post-focal regions and presupposed dependent clauses. Given that there were no filler items in any of the two tasks, it is very likely that participants were aware of the minimal pair contrasts. It is remarkable that, despite the obviousness of the contrasts, speakers and listeners failed to differentiate between initial and final accent conditions in the post-focal and presupposed conditions (the unsuccessful identification of [dídan/didán] in all experimental conditions will be discussed in Subsection 4.1).
The current study found that Persian word accent is deletable. Members of accentual minimal pairs become homophonous within post-focal regions and presupposed dependent clauses. This result is in accord with claims in the traditional Persian grammars that accent contrasts are neutralized in such contexts.
Our finding disconfirms the results of Abolhasanizadeh et al. (
There is one finding in our data that was unexpected. While both minimal pairs ([tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ] and [dídan/didán]) were found to be deaccented in the post-focal condition (related to contrastive focus) and in the presupposed condition (in dependent clauses of factive verbs), the overall recognition score was significantly lower for the pair [dídan/didán]. In fact, it did not even reach the baseline level. The question is why listeners performed poorly with the accented forms of this pair in both the neutral/focal conditions and the non-presupposed condition. Participants cannot have had any difficulty identifying accent locations, given that Persian speakers are widely exposed to the contrastive function of accent and will immediately spot incorrect accent placements. This position is supported by high recognition scores for the members of the minimal pair [tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ]. We suggest that participants must have had some difficulties with the association of target items with the response buttons, despite the fact that they all indicated that they had mastered the association after the trial stimuli. Their confusion may have arisen because the colloquial minimal pair [dídan] ‘they saw’ vs. [didán] ‘they have seen’ involves a grammatical contrast between past and perfect forms of the same verbal stem, for which speakers may have a less clearly defined intuition than for lexical contrasts. Recall that these items appeared on the screen in their literary forms ([didand] vs. [dideand]). The members of the other minimal pair, by contrast, represented different lexemes with clearly different meanings. Moreover, there is no difference between the colloquial and literary realizations of these items, unlike the situation for [dídan/didán].
One observation in our production data (Experiment I) concerns the question of whether accent for focus is phonologically different from neutral accent in Persian. As noted in Subsection 1.3, previous experimental studies have shown that focused constituents are realized with a higher F0 (
Mean F0 contours for [ún tɒ́beʃe] (panel (a)) and [ún tɒbéʃe] (panel (b)) on a normalized time scale for neutral and focal pronunciations separately, pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz).
Mean F0 contours for [unɒ́ dídaneʃ] (panel (a)) and [unɒ́ didáneʃ] (panel (b)) on a normalized time scale for neutral and focal pronunciations separately, pooled over 8 speakers. The values are given in semitones (reference: 100 Hz).
Our data do not confirm the claim that the accent for focus is consistently higher than the neutral accent, suggesting that F0-raising is not a consistent mechanism to mark focus in Persian. Perceptual data reported by Taheri et al. (
To sum up, focus is marked by post-focal compression, such that elements with neutral focus and narrow focus are homophonous (see also the discussion in Subsection 4.3).
A final observation in Figures
The reason why the earlier literature has frequently reported extra high F0 for Persian focus may be due to experimental procedures that confound the effect of focus with that of (paralinguistic) emphasis. In such procedures, participants are instructed in a way that may give them the impression that the task is about emphasizing words, i.e. pronouncing words with a great energy, resulting in higher F0, higher intensity and greater duration. In many cases, experimenters present participants with bold or underlined letters in target items. Moreover, it is frequently the case that during the training sessions, the experimenters use the Arabic loanword [taʔkid] ‘emphasis’ to refer to focus, as for example in the case of Abolhasanizadeh et al. (
F0 contours of four realizations of the sentence [nilio landan didim] ‘We saw Nili in London’ as variations of focus and/or emphasis, spoken by a male speaker. Panel (a) has focus on the whole sentence and no particular emphasis on any word. Panel (b) has focus on [landan] and no particular emphasis on any word. Panel (c) has focus and emphasis on [landan]. Panel (d) has focus on [landan] and emphasis on [nili].
(12)
nili=o
Nili=
landan
London
did=im.
saw=1
‘We saw Nili in London.’
The realization of (12) shown in panel (a) of Figure
The prompts and stimuli in our experiments illustrate
(13)
ɒlmɒn
Germany
faɢat
only
[junɒn]
Greece=
bord.
beat.3
‘It was only Greece that Germany beat.’
Karimi claims that contrastive focus is realized either morphosyntactically or prosodically, which suggests that the focus for [junɒn] in (14) can either be expressed through deaccentuation of the verb [bord], as in (14a), or by attaching the focus adverb to the object, as in (14b).
(14)
ɒlmɒn
Germany
junɒn=o
Greece=
bord.
beat.3
‘Germany beat Greece.’
a. | ɒlmɒ́n [junɒ́n] |
|
b. | ɒlmɒn faɢat [junɒn] |
However, the use of a focus adverb like [faɢat] ‘only’ in no way absolves the speaker from employing prosodic focus marking in the form of post-focus deaccentuation, as shown in (15) with its F0 contour depicted in Figure
F0 contour of [ɒlmɒ́n faɢát junɒ́n=o bord] ‘It was only Greece that Germany beat’, spoken by a male speaker.
(15) | ɒlmɒ́n faɢát [junɒ́n] |
Moreover, prosodic focus may be the only way in which the scope of the adverb is signalled, as shown in (16). The focus adverb here takes scope over the preceding subject, since the elements after the focus adverb are deaccented.
(16) | [ɒlmɒ́n] |
‘It was only Germany that beat Greece.’ |
These observations strongly suggest that adverbs like [faɢat] cannot express focus independently of the prosodic focus marking.
This study aimed to establish whether Persian word accents are deleted in post-focal regions and presupposed embedded clauses, such that the members of accentual minimal pairs become homophonous. The results of two experiments confirmed that accents are in fact deleted. A production experiment showed low F0 plateaus on the post-focal and presupposed constituents, while perception experiment showed that deaccented members of minimal pairs are not recognized above the just-noticeable-difference (JND) baseline.
The finding that Persian deaccents after the focus concurs with Xu et al.’s (
A final remark here is that the morphosyntactic nature of accent distribution in sentences does not bear on the generalization that post-lexical phonology is governed by the prosodic hierarchy (
The additional file for this article can be found as follows:
Corpus belonging to Experiment I. DOI:
1/2/3 = person,
Persian has a small tonal inventory. In addition to the accent (H), there are two intonational boundary tones: L% for declaratives and Wh-questions, and H% for yes/no questions (cf.
For a similar approach to morphological wordhood in Persian, see Lazard (
Hosseini (
While for most compound structures, internal constituents are independent
The observation that
In this type of nominal reduplication, which is sometimes referred to as “echo reduplication”, the first segment of the base (here the compound noun [doxtar+amme] ‘cousin’) is replaced by [m] or [p] in the reduplicant. Echo reduplications are used to express a wide range of meaning such as generality or multiplicity of entities. They are spontaneously and productively formed in everyday use. The idea that echo reduplications are single
Hosseini (
To illustrate the flexibility in the direction of cliticization of prepositions, consider the preposition [az] in the sentential structure [mán az alí geréft=am] (I-from-Ali-caught.1
For the sake of clarity, we do not use the term
Note that this accentual contrast does not hold between 3sg forms of past/perfect since these forms have zero person marking (e.g., [bord-e] ‘took-
There have been some characterizations of sentential accent that require comment. Many researchers have described the final accent within a Persian sentence as more prominent than others, referring to it by such terms as “nuclear accent”, “sentence stress”, etc. The basis for these claims is unclear to us. There is no indication that the phonology of the language distinguishes, for example, between the two accents in (4a). In our view all accents at the phrase/clause level are equal.
Defining prosodic domains higher than
The morphosyntactic nature of Persian accent is further supported by the observation that some grammatical words show variable accent position depending on the syntactic context. For instance, while the intensifier [xejli] ‘very’ is accented on the first syllable in positive sentences, e.g., [xéjli bad bud] ‘It was very bad.’, it takes accent on the final syllable in negative sentences, e.g., [xejlí bad nabud] ‘It was not very bad.’ (only the relevant accents are shown). Note that in both contexts the intensifier is parsed as a single
Persian is generally described as an SOV language, while allowing a great degree of rearrangements for pragmatic purposes. Crucially, post-verbal arguments and adverbials are structurally unaccented elements, and cannot be prosodically marked for focus (
Example (5e) is a case of “double focus” (
A similar case has been reported for French Noun+Adjective sequences by Hamlaoui et al. (
Karimi (
The non-final position of accent in the verb form [mídune], which is a syntactically complex element (cf.
It has widely been observed that English factive predicates may take non-presupposed (asserted) complements in certain contexts (e.g.,
This phenomenon is comparable to the English “Slifting (Sentence lifting) constructions” (
The first minimal pair, i.e. [tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ], is the same as that used in Abolhasanizadeh et al. (
A reviewer expressed concern that the use of example recordings might have amounted to an imitation task. Our purpose for using example dialogues was to ensure that participants understood the task. We followed a common procedure to give an example of a stimulus and a possible response and gave participants an opportunity to see if they had any questions. There was therefore no specific training of subjects as to how to pronounce the materials. We preferred this method over the alternative of discarding erroneous readings, as this would have required a criterion that might have pre-judged the results of the experiment. With the exception of a few evident disfluencies, all productions by our subjects were processed. Our procedure was uncomplicated and no skills were required that go beyond what the average naïve speaker of the language can do without training.
Given that the context sentences were spoken during the experimental session by the experimenter, one reviewer asked how variability between different experimental sessions was controlled for. The contexts sentences were either interrogatives or declaratives and were consistently pronounced by the experimenter with unmarked and grammatically correct intonation. Phonetic variability between different sessions was considered irrelevant for the purposes of this study.
Mean F0 differences between the target syllables in the post-focal condition are as follows. For the initial syllables, the difference is 0.09 ST (SD=1.01) ([tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ]) and 0.55 ST (SD=2.31) ([dídan/didán]), while the difference between the final syllables is 0.02 ST (SD=0.74) ([tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ]) and 0.14 ST (SD=0.64) ([dídan/didán]).
Mean F0 differences between the target syllables in the presupposed condition are as follows. For the initial syllables, the difference is 0.42 ST (SD=0.94) ([tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ]) and 0.08 ST (SD=0.62) ([dídan/didán]), while for the final syllables the difference is 0.16 ST (SD=0.41) ([tɒ́beʃ/tɒbéʃ]) and 0.36 ST (SD=0.87) ([dídan/didán]).
The difficulty with the identification of the verbal pair [dídan/didán] ‘they saw/they have seen’ might be generalized to other past vs. perfect accentual contrasts, as suggested by informal observations. In a small-scale experiment, listeners showed difficulty in distinguishing between members of the two minimal pairs [ráftim/raftím] ‘we went/we have gone’ and [umádin/umadín] ‘you came/you have come’.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this reference.
Note that the focus adverb is itself deaccented in (16). Otherwise, (16) would be interpreted as having narrow focus on the adverb, a situation that might arise in cases of metalinguistic correction.
Under specific discourse conditions, the adverb in (16) may be interpreted as taking scope over the object (or the object+verb combination), in particular in cases in which the scope is repeated information. Thus, in reply to
Our observations on focus adverbs can be extended to some other morphosyntactic focus markers discussed in Karimi (
We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments that greatly improved this paper; to Sajjad Peyvasteh and Atefeh Moslehi for help with the experiments; to Joop Kerkhoff and Farbod Javanshab for technical support; to Francisco Torreira for a Praat script and to our participants for their enthusiastic collaboration. We would like to thank Nasir Asadi, Mahmood Bijankhan, Saeed Ghaniabadi, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Lei Wang and participants at the 8th Speech Prosody conference in Boston for their discussion and suggestions. This research was supported by the Centre for Language Studies (CLS) at the Radboud University Nijmegen, through a travel grant to the first author.
The authors have no competing interests to declare.