The Phonology and Phonetics of Prosodic Prominence in Persian

The Phonology and Phonetics of Prosodic Prominence in Persian A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION SCIENCES BY Seyed Ayat Hosseini JANUARY 2014 Dissertation Committee: Chair: Shin-ichi Tanaka (The University of Tokyo) Yuki Hirose (The University of Tokyo) Shuichi Yatabe (The University of Tokyo) Yosuke Igarashi (Hiroshima University) Satoko Yoshie (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) © 2014 Seyed Ayat Hosseini. All rights reserved. Acknowledgments The completion of this dissertation would never have happened without the support and the contribution of many people. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to some of them. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest respect and gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Shin-ichi Tanaka, for being a constant source of support, encouragement, and constructive advice. His exceptional dedication, generosity and caring have constantly extended far beyond the duty of an academic supervisor. With him I learned to avoid prejudice and stay unbiased with respect to linguistic theories. He created an excellent atmosphere in which all the students could share their knowledge and learn from each other in a friendly environment. I consider myself very fortunate to have such a wonderful supervisor. I would also like to thank all the members of the dissertation committee, for taking the time to read the manuscript and for their helpful comments and precious advices. Prof. Yuki Hirose guided me through my experiments and statistical analyses. She kindly offered me a job in the Sound Lab as her research assistant for three years, where I learned a lot about laboratory phonetics and psycholinguistic experiments. Prof. Shuichi Yatabe helpfully criticized and challenged the syntactic analyses adopted in this dissertation, and helped me improve them. Prof. Yosuke Igarashi helped me modify and improve my interpretations of my experiment results, in our fruitful meetings and also by his valuable comments via email. And Prof. Satoko Yoshie generously shared with me her encyclopedic knowledge of Persian language, and opened my eyes to many aspects I had overlooked. I would also like to thank those people who are not on my committee, but nevertheless helped me in one way or another. My special appreciation goes to Prof. Junko Ito for her inspiring phonology course in International Christian University (ICU), Tokyo, in spring 2010, where I came up with the basic idea of the analysis presented in chapter 3 of this dissertation. My sincere thanks are due to Prof. Carina Jahani, Prof. Geoffrey Haig and Prof. Agnes Korn, for their insightful comments and suggestions on one of my papers which contributed much to this dissertation. I am also grateful to all participants in regular meetings of Tokyo Circle of Phonologists (TCP) where I had the opportunity to present my work many times and benefit from their invaluable expertise. I also had many helpful comments from or interesting conversations with scholars and graduate students in all conferences and seminars I attended during past four years. ii Although this dissertation is thoroughly devoted to prosody of Persian, I had the chance to pursue my other academic interests, Japanese language and second language education during my Ph.D. program in The University of Tokyo (Todai). I learned about methods of teaching Japanese as a foreign language in classes and seminars held by Prof. Atsuko Kondoh. Prof. Takashi Nomura deepened my insights to Japanese grammar, traditional Japanese studies (kokugo-gaku), and historical changes of Japanese language. In the classes held by Prof. Izabelle Grenon, I learned a lot about theories and research methodologies in the field of language education, and Prof. Tom Gally introduced me to second language writing pedagogy. I sincerely acknowledge all their teachings. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support I received throughout my Ph.D. program. I greatly appreciate the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) for awarding me a scholarship to carry my academic life peacefully throughout my doctoral course. I would also like to thank the department of Language and Information Sciences for awarding me a six-month grant for research. Part of the work presented in chapter 4 of this dissertation was financially supported by National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL). I would like to thank all professors, post-docs and staff in NINJAL, especially Prof. Haruo Kubozono who has always been supportive and caring. A special word of thanks is also due to Prof. Akiko Katayama for trusting me and allowing me to be a part of Komaba Writers’ Studio (KWS) in Todai, where I worked as an academic writing tutor for three years and learned many things about academic writing and working with undergraduate students. I also thank the Department of English Language for having me as a teaching assistant from the very beginning of my doctoral program to the last days of it. I am also grateful to Mr. Walter Arnold the representative director in AIT Foreign Language Center in Tokyo where I worked as a part-time language teacher, translator and interpreter for four years. I should take this opportunity to thank my previous linguistics teachers. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my master's thesis supervisor in the University of Tehran, Prof. Mahmood Bijankhan. His encouragements and positive attitude was highly influential in drawing me to the field of phonology and phonetics. I am also thankful to my master's thesis advisor Prof. Ali Darzi, who familiarized me with argumentation in linguistics. I am deeply indebted to my first linguistics teacher Prof. Reza Moghaddamkia, whose interesting classes attracted me to the field of linguistics. I cannot go without mentioning Prof. Yosuke Momiyama my supervisor in Nagoya University where I was an exchange undergraduate student in 2003-2004. He introduced me to Cognitive Linguistics, and encouraged me to start reading linguistics books and papers written in Japanese. iii My heartfelt thanks go to my fellow graduate students from whom I learned many valuable things through our discussions, debates and chats, in seminars, meetings and over dinners. Without them my time in Todai would have been much poorer and less enjoyable. Bum-Ki Son helped me a lot when I first entered Todai. He taught me many things about Serial OT and syllable structure in Korean. He also showed me nice restaurants and diners around the campus. Kyoko Yamaguchi (Takano) and Kohei Nishimura were always helpful and supportive. I learned about Japanese morphology and prosodic phonology from them. Yuki Asahi was always there when I needed help. He helped me learn much about the rules and regulations in Todai. My conversations with Yuki always involved phonological phenomena in languages along the Silk Road, like reduplication and vowel harmony in Turkish, Persian and Mongolian. Clemens Poppe has always been a truly good friend to me. He helped me have access to some publications which I could not find anywhere. Clemens and I talked about dialects of Japan, Dutch phonology, music and football. I will never forget Daiki Hashimoto for his talent for linguistics and also for his wonderful sense of humor. I learned a lot about Government Phonology and Gunma prefecture from him. Marco Fonseca’s fascination with Usage-based Phonology and frequency-based approaches to linguistics intrigued me. I learned about the prosody of Japanese and various dialects of Chinese from Xiaoyan Xie and Yang Yang, and about diachronic changes in Slavic languages, especially about palatalization in Russian from Naoya Watabe. Yu Tanaka, Yasushi Otaki and Ryota Horikawa were not official members of our phonology group, but I had the opportunity to study with them and learn many things from them. I will always remember what Yasushi taught me about loanword phonology, gemination in Japanese, trains and baseball. And during the short period she studied with our group, Maho Morimoto kindly proofread two chapters of this dissertation for me. Thank you all for your friendship, support and for sharing your knowledge and thoughts with me. My heartfelt thanks to my Iranian friends in Tokyo Kaveh Maghsoudi, Mostafa KamaliTabrizi, Fatemeh Gharahkhani, Zeinab Sadoughi, Saeid-Reza Ettehadi, Leyla Ghiaee, Reza Amani-Eilanlou and Farzaneh Moradi for being wonderful friends, for sharing with me their intuition as native speakers, and for helping me conduct the pilot version of my production and perception experiments as participants. I am forever indebted to my parents, and my brother who encouraged and helped me at every stage of my personal and academic life, and longed to see this achievement come true. I would also like to thank my parents and brothers in law for all their support and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to my wife Sarah for her love, understanding, constant support and great patience at all times. This dissertation is dedicated to her. iv Abstract This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words. This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible v accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent. The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable. If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently. vi Table of contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Main goals and major findings ...………………………………………….……... 1 1.2 Outline of the dissertation ……………………………………………..………..…2 1.3 Theoretical framework of the study ………………………...………………….… 4 1.4 Persian language……………………………………………….………………..… 8 Chapter 2 Previous studies 2.1 Phonological studies…………………………………………………….………... 14 2.1.1 Amini (1997)……………………………………………………….….….. 15 2.1.2 Kahnemuyipour (2003)…………………………………………….……... 15 2.1.3 Phonological studies within AM…………………………………..…….... 18 Eslami (2000)…………………………………..…….............................. 19 Mahjani (2003)…………………………………..……............................. 20 Sadat-Tehrani (2007)……………………………………………….…… 21 2.2 Phonetic studies…………………………………………………………………… 22 2.2.1 Abolhassanizadeh et al. (2012)…………………………………..……....... 23 2.2.2 Sadeghi (2012)…………………………………………………………….. 24 2.2.3 Taheri-Ardali and Xu (2012)…………………………………..…….......... 25 Chapter 3 Phonological Word and below 3.1 Introduction………………………………..……...…………………………….... 26 3.2 Foot structure……………………………………………………………………… 26 3.3 Proclitics and enclitics…………………………………………………………….. 32 3.3.1 Previous attempts………………………………………………………….. 34 Extrametricality………………………………………………………….. 34 Clitics as autonomous PWords………………………………………….. 36 Two other Proposals…………………………………………………….. 37 3.3.2 Proclitics……………………………………………………………..…… 37 PWord-initial aspiration, an experiment…………………………………39 3.3.3 Enclitics……………………………………………………………..……. 41 Syllabification……………………………………………………………. 42 3.3.4 Further evidence……………………………………………………………44 Proclitics and Syllabification……………………………………………. 44 Uninterruptibility…………………………………………………………44 Glide epenthesis…………………………………………………………..45 3.4 Phonological Word: an OT account…………………………………………….... 47 3.5 The direction of cliticization……………………………………………………….53 3.6 Multiple function words………………………………………………………..… 58 3.7 ‘Exceptionally stressed’ words……………………………………………………. 61 3.8 Summary…………………………………………………………………………... 64 vii Chapter 4 Phonological Phrase and above 4.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………….. 65 4.2 Prosodic structure of DPs and VPs: a summary……………...…………………… 65 4.3 Ezafe constructions………………….………………..…….................................... 67 4.3.1 Ezafe constructions as single PWords…………………………………….. 68 4.3.2 Ezafe constructions as projections of the functional head Ezafe………….. 70 4.3.3 Prominence pattern of Ezafe constructions……………………………….. 72 4.3.4 Are possessors prosodically different?..........................................................74 4.3.5 Lexicalized Ezafe constructions…………….…………………………….. 77 4.3.6 Prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions…………………………..……. 79 4.4 Syntax-Phonology interface and OT constraints………………………………….. 83 4.4.1 The problem of XP-external clitics………………………………………... 83 Alignment…………………………………………………………………84 Match theory…………………………………..…….................................85 4.4.2 MAP-XP…………………………………..……........................................... 89 4.5 Phonological Phrases: a unified OT account…………………………….………... 92 4.6 Prosodic heads and accent associations…………………………………………… 97 4.7 Ezafe constructions and information structure……………………………………. 101 4.8 Summary…………………………………..…….................................................... 102 Chapter 5 phonetic differences between pre-nuclear and nuclear accents 5.1 Introduction…………………………………..…….................................................104 5.1.1 Delayed peaks…………………………………..……................................. 107 5.2 Acoustic correlates of pre-nuclear and nuclear accents…………………………… 110 5.2.1 Method…………………………………..……............................................ 110 Experiment materials…………………………………..……....................111 Participants and recordings……………………………………………... 114 Measurements……………………………………………………………. 115 Statistical analyses…………………………………..……....................... 119 5.2.2 Results…………………………………..……............................................. 120 Pitch…………………………………..……..............................................120 Duration…………………………………..……....................................... 130 Overall intensity…………………………………..……........................... 137 Spectral tilt…………………………………..……................................... 140 Vowel quality…………………………………..……................................ 141 5.2.3 Discussion…………………………………..……....................................... 143 5.3 Perceptual correlates of pre-nuclear and nuclear accents…………………………. 146 5.3.1 Methods…………………………………..……...........................................148 Recording Materials…………………………………..……..................... 148 Recordings…………………………………..……................................... 151 Manipulations…………………………………..…….............................. 151 Masking…………………………………..…….........................................157 viii Praat Experiments…………………………………..……....................... 157 Participants…………………………………..…….................................. 159 5.3.2 Test A…………………………………..…….............................................. 159 Results and discussions…………………………………..……................. 161 5.3.3 Test B…………………………………..…….............................................. 164 Results and discussions…………………………………..……............... 165 5.4 General discussions and summary…………………………………..…….............. 168 Chapter 6 Conclusions 6.1 Summary of proposals and concluding remarks………………………………….. 175 6.2 Suggestions for further studies…………………………………..……................... 178 References…………………………………..……........................................................... 180 ix Key to abbreviations ACC accusative COMP comparative EZ Ezafe IND indefinite INDI indicative PAST past tense PFV perfective PL plural POSS possessive PR proper noun SG singular fnc function word lex lexical word IPhrase Intonational Phrase PPhrase Phonological Phrase PWord Phonological Word υ Utterance ι Intonational Phrase φ Phonological Phrase ω Phonological Word π Foot σ Syllable μ Mora x