Post-focal and factive deaccentuation in Persian

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• accent
• deaccentuation
• focus
• post-focus compression
• factivity
• presupposition