Early peak: a case in Persian

Abstract

This study investigates the intonational properties of vocative structure in standard Persian in the framework of Autosegmental-metrical (AM) phonology. In Persian, all lexical units are stressed in their final syllable and there is a languagespecific feature in Persian according to which pitch accents are aligned with lexically stressed syllables. Contrary to the said feature, all previous studies claim that in vocative structure, it is the first syllable that is accented. The present study suggests the intonational pattern of ^H+H*H-(L/H)% for vocative structure in Persian, using Persian Tone and Break Indices (PToBI) annotations. Here ^H stands for early peak aligned with the second syllable, and H* stands for the pitch accent aligned with the lexically stressed, here the last syllable and Hstands for the phrase tone which signals the non-finality in the vocative utterance. Perceptual experiments support the hypotheses behind the study.