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An Instrumental Study of Prosodic Features and Intonation in Modern Farsi (Persian)

This work was an attempt in studying Farsi prosodic and intonation system within the framework of Autosegmental Metrical Phonology. Throughout the dissertation I tried to define the set of basic intonation units in Farsi, and further analyzed their distributions throughout Farsi prosodic phrases. I also attempted to describe various intonation patterns of Farsi utterances in terms of the relevant prosodic features and properties such as intonational contour, prominence, intonational phrasing, and boundary tones. The study is within Pierrehumbert approach (1980), i.e. a model of intonation originally developed by her and used in the investigation of English intonation. The same two level primitive tones (namely high and low) were used for phonological representation of Farsi utterances. These level tones are then employed into tonal events (pitch accents and boundary tones), which occur within utterances. It is the behaviors of these tonal events throughout various utterances, which were the focus of this work. In fact such behaviors contribute toward distinguishing between various sentences types, or within the same sentence type determine nuisances of meaning and points of emphasis. For this study complete texts as well as individual sample sentences were selected and read by four native speakers of Farsi. They include all types of sentences namely declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives and exclamatory sentences. Analysis of data revealed that in Farsi the prosodic structure consists of three prosodic units, namely Intonation Phrases, Intermediate Phrases, and Accentual Phrases. It was also found that the default pattern for Farsi pitch accents in all sentence types was L+H*. So in Farsi sentence types are mostly distinguished by their boundary tones. Further in the dissertation, each sentence type was investigated for its particular pattern and arrangements of its tonal events. Among them declaratives and interrogatives were paid special attention, as they appeared to have the most basic intonational patterns. Considering the space of an MSc dissertation, some preliminary investigations were also carried out on focus within declaratives and interrogatives.