The Prosodic Typology of the Phonological Word in the Yazdi Variety of Persian: An Acoustic Approach

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Associate Professor of Linguistics, Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran

2 PhD in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Persian Language and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Different varieties of a language can belong to different prosodic types. Standard Persian (SP) has been classified as a stress accent language based on three acoustic parameters: a) the acoustic correlates of prominent syllables, b) prominence in focal constituents, and c) stress hierarchies. This study hypothesized that Yazdi Persian, with perceptually different word-level prominence pattern, might belong to a different prosodic type. Previous studies disagree on the position of word-level stress and its acoustic correlates in Yazdi. Using the same parameters applied to SP, this study examined the prominence pattern and prosodic typology of Yazdi. An analysis of nonce words in post-focal contexts showed that, despite deaccentuation, the duration of initial and final vowels was significantly higher than the other vowels, forming a “hammock” or edge-prominence pattern. To probe further, focal constructions were analyzed. Results showed that the penultimate vowel—rather than the first or fourth vowel, consistently had higher F0 values. This challenges the principle of culminativity. We argue that the hammock pattern of edge vowels marks word boundary, while increased F0 on the penultimate syllable in focal contexts reflects post-lexical prominence. These findings suggest that the Yazdi variety of Persian belongs to a non-stress accent type.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Persian Language and Iranian Dialects

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 15 October 2025

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