Lexical and Post-lexical Stress Oppositions in Persian

Author
B. Jam
Assistant professor of linguistics, Shahre-kord University
Abstract
1- Introduction

There are semantically different words and structures in Persian that are identical in pronunciation except for the place of stress. These pairs which are called stress oppositions are of two types; the first type includes a lexical stress opposition between two lexical entries called a stress minimal pair. The second type is either the result of some phonological processes or the interaction among morphological, syntactic and phonetic factors at post-lexical level. One or both sides of these stress oppositions are syntactic phrases. There are many stress oppositions in Persian; however only five of which are stress minimal pairs. Being a minimal pair is not the sole analyzable feature in these stress oppositions. There are other features which merit further consideration. The objectives of this research were to introduce and discuss features of stress minimal pairs, to introduce and classify the whole possible stress oppositions in Persian according to their lexical/ syntactic categories, and to figure out whether stress shift caused semantic changes or it was the effect or consequence of different elements in stress oppositions.



2- Theoretical framework

Phrase Structure Grammar (Chomsky, 1957) is the theoretical framework which was used in this research to classif post- lexical structures. In this theoretical framework the structure of constituents is specified using phrase structure rules:

S → VP NP

NP → {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN}

VP → V NP (PP) (Adv)



3- Methodology

This research aimed at introducing different lexical and post-lexical stress oppositions in Persian. To this end, structures other than lexical entries were classified into noun/verb phrases using Phrase Structure Grammar. Accordingly, various stress oppositions might include two lexical entries, a lexical entry and a noun/verb phrase, two noun phrases, two verb phrases, a noun phrase and a verb phrase, as well as emphatic stress. It is noteworthy that the phonetic representation (PR) rather than the underlying representation (UR) was used to specify stress oppositions. Finally, the morphemes of stress oppositions where compared in order to specify the main reason of their semantic (or grammatical) difference.



4- Results & discussion


Although Persian is so rich in terms of having stress oppositions, it only has five stress minimal pairs. The necessary condition that must be there for a stress opposition to be considered a stress minimal pair is that both its members must be lexical entries. Hence, a post-lexical stress opposition of which one member is the result of a phonological change, or one member or both members are a syntactic phrase is not considered a stress minimal pair. Lexical stress or being a stress minimal pair is not the only criterion to evaluate stress oppositions. Stress shift is regarded the main reason for meaning change if there is no other distinctive factor at work, that is, we can say stress shift has caused meaning change when both members of a stress opposition consist of identical morphemes, or one of the members is not the result of a phonological process. Otherwise, stress itself is the consequence of different morphemes or application of a phonological process. Accordingly, the findings of this research are in contrast with the studies in the literature which regarded the stress opposition between a word and a phrase as a minimal pair, or posited that the meaning difference between two unlelated words of a stress minimal pair is due to stress shift.



5- Conclusions & suggestions



The significance of this paper is that it is the first research to address lexical and post-lexical stress oppositions in Persian and to discuss how they were created.

Moreover, this paper was an attempt to reduce the uncertainty in regard to the nature and identity of stress oppositions through introducing and classifying them and using the titles “lexical and post-lexical stress oppositions” to designate them.



A future research suggestion could be investigating lexical and post-lexical stress oppositions in other languages.

Keywords

Subjects

• Ahn, B. (2015). “There’s nothing exceptional about the phrasal stress rule”. LingBuzz/002458.
• Amini, A. (1997). “On stress in Persian”. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, 16(1). Pp: 1-20.
• Bijankhan, M. (2005). Phonology: Optimality Theory. Tehran: SAMT. [In Persian]. Bijankhan, M. (2013). Phonetic System of the Persian Language. Tehran: SAMT [In Persian].
• Bijankhan, M.; J. Sheykhzadegan; M. Bahrani & M. Ghayoomi (2011). “Lessons from building a Persian written corpus: Peykare”. Language Resources and Evaluation. 45.Pp: 143–164.
• Brooke, M. (1981). “Can stress induce homography?” .Word Ways: Vol. 14 : Iss. 4 . Article 17.
• Carstairs- McCarthy, A. (2002). An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure. Edinburgh University Press.
• Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures, Mouton. The Hague.
• Cutler, A.; D. Dahan & W.Van Donselaar (1997). “Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: A literature review”. Language and Speech. 40(2). Pp: 141-201.
• Feldstein, R. F. (1986). “The Russian verbal stress system”. International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics. 33. Pp: 43-61.
• Ferguson, C.A. )1957(. “Word stress in Persian”. Language. 33(2):123- 135.
• Garellek, M. & J. White (2015).“Phonetics of Tongan Stress”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 45(1). Pp: 13-34.
• Gimson, A. C. )1980(. An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. 3rd ed. New York and London: Edward Arnold.
• Gussenhoven, C. (2005). “Procliticized phonological phrases in English: Evidence from rhythm”. Studia Linguistica. 59. Pp: 174-193.
• Haghshenas, A. (1977). Phonetics. Tehran: Agah Publications. [In Persian].
• Howel, J. (2016). “Revisiting English word stress and rhythm in the post-nuclear domain”. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 140(4). Pp: 3399- 3399•
• Hualde, J. I. (2007). “Stress removal and stress addition in Spanish”. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. 5 (2)/6 (1). Pp: 59-89.
• Huss, V. (1978). “English Word Stress in the Post-Nuclear Position”. Phonetica. 35. Pp: 86- 105.
• Jam, B. (2015). “Explaining different pronunciations of the enclitic verb /-ast/ in different contexts: an optimality theoretic account”. Journal of Language Research. 6(1). Pp: 21-40. [In Persian].
• Jespersen, O. (1954). A Modern English Grammar based on Historical Principles, Part I, (originally published 1909), London: Alien & Unwin Katamba, F. (1993). Morphology. Macmilan.
• Kalbasi, I. (1992). The Derivational Structure of Words in Today’s Persian. Tehran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies. [In Persian].
• Kingdon, R. (1958). The Groundwork of English Stress. London: Longmans.
• Kurath, H. (1967). A Phonology and Prosody of Modern English. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
• Lazard, G. (1992). A Grammar of Contemporary Persain. Cosat Mesa: Mazda Publishers in Association with Bibliotheca, Calif. Translated by Shierly A. Lyon: Grammaire du person contemporain, 1957.
• Majidi, M.R. & E. Ternes (1999). “Persian (Farsi)”. In: Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124-125.
• Martínez-Paricio, V. (2012). Superfeet as recursion. In N. Arnett & R. Bennett (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (Pp: 259–269). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
• Matthews, P.H. (1974). Morphology: An Introduction to the Theory of Word- Structure.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Meshkato-Dini, M. (1995). Sound Pattern of Language. Mashhad: Ferdowsi University of Mashhad Press. [In Persian].
• Meshkato-Dini, M. (2005). Persian Grammar: The Lexical Categories and Merge. Tehran: SAMT. [In Persian].
• Mielke, J. & E. Hume (2005). Distinctive features. In: Encylopedia of Language and Linguistics. ed. by Keith Brown, 2th edition, Elsevirt.
• Najafi, A. (1979). Fundamentals of Linguistics and Their Application in Persian. Tehran: Niloufar Publications. [In Persian].
• Roettger,T. B.; A. Bruggeman & M. Grice (2015). “Word stress in Tashlhiyt: Postlexical prominence in disguise?” In: Proceedings of ICPhS XVIII. Glasgow.
• Saalfeld, A. K. (2009). Stress in the beginning Spanish classroom: an instructional study (Doctoral dissertation). Available from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database, (UMI No. 3363080).
• Shaghaghi, V. (2008). An Introduction to Morphology. Tehran: SAMT .[In Persian].
• Sole Sabater, M. J. (1991). “Stress and rhythm in English”. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Inglese. No. 04. ISSN 0214-4808. Pp: 145-162.
• Tabatabaei, A. (2003). Compound Nouns and Adjectives in Persian. Tehran: Iran University Press.[In Persian].
Language Related Research
Volume 10, Issue 1 - Serial Number 49
March and April 2019
Pages 99-127