Phonological Evidences for Clitic Group in Prosodic Hierarchy of Present-day Persian Language

Persian locates stress on the last syllable of a phonological / lexical word. Inflectional and derivational suffixes absorb stress after annexing to the end of words. Enclitics behave in an exceptional manner to this rule, i.e. stress location remains at the end of words. The purpose of this article is to posit phonological evidences for inclusion of clitic group in the present-day Persian prosodic hierarchy. Evidences include vowel deletion of enclitics when host ends to a vowel and also Ezafe vowel /e/ deletion in colloquial Persian. Such pattern is not seen at the levels of phonological word and phonological phrase. In addition, intonational pattern of a host plus enclitic and intonational pattern of a phonological word ending to an enclitic are structurally different.