Peak Delay in Persian Intonational Phonology: Phonetic or Phonological?

There are two competing views with respect to the tonal structure of Persian pitch accents. According to the first view, peak delay in Persian intonational grammar serves no phonological or contrastive function. This view assumes that the earlier or later peak alignment in Persian does not lead to contrasts in intonational meanings. As such, pitch accents in Persian are phonologically characterized as either L+H* or L*+H. According to the second view, it is assumed that both L+H* and L*+H exist in Persian intonational phonology, but they act at different layers of Persian prosodic structure: L+H* operates at the level of phonological word, while L*+H functions at the level of enclitic group. The present study addressed the phonetic behavior of Persian pitch accents in different prosodic contexts. The phonetic evidence found in this research shows that the tonal structure of Persian includes only one pitch accent, namely L*+H, whose peak (H tone) is realized with magnitude degrees of late alignment from no delay to long delay according to peak alignment continuum.