The intonation of Persian polar questions

Abstract

Statements and questions in Persian are distinguished not only by morpho-syntactic but also by intonational means. This paper studies how questions are signaled intonationally in utterances that have no morpho-syntactic cues. A production experiment was designed that systematically manipulated sentence mode as well as the within-word position of stress in the target words in pre-nuclear and nuclear accentual positions. Our results showed that H pre-nuclear and nuclear peaks are higher and located earlier in question than statement utterances. Also, the rise to a F0 peak as well as the following fall in the pre-nuclear and nuclear accentual positions are shorter and steeper in the question contour. The data further revealed that the exact phonetic realization of pre-nuclear and nuclear accentual rises and falls depended on the proximity of adjacent tonal targets in the different word stress conditions we set up. Our findings readily lend themselves to an auto-segmental approach to intonational phonology which treats tunes as strings of independent categorically distinct tonal units associated with specific elements in the segmental structure.