phrase accent in persian intonational phonology

this article addresses the phonetic and phonological representation of h- phrase accent in the tonal structure of persian pre-nuclear accents. in an experimental study, three groups of pre-nuclear accentual phrases, namely, phrases with antepenultimate, penultimate and final stress pattern, were selected for tonal examination. materials were designed so as to yield under-pressure and pressure free prosodic environments. the sentences were then read by four speakers of standard persian. results revealed some  evidence for the presence of  phrase accent as a part of the tonal structure of all groups, except for oxytones in which there is not sufficient segmental space for the realization of the h- phrase tone. thus, we may transcribe pre-nuclear accents in persia as a sequence of an l+h* pitch accent and a h- phrase accent: l+h*h, whereby l+h* is associated with the stressed syllable and the h- is spread as a plateau from the accented syllable to the end of the accentual phrase. the observations further revealed that the h- plateau is realized in different ways depending on the stress pattern of the accentual phrase. the h- plateau can best be explained using the tone copy analysis which assumes that a plateau results from copying a phrase accent from the boundary to units which do not bear tones such as final syllables.