Phonological stress in Gilaki

In this Article, we investigated the phonological distribution of stress in Gilaki. To this end, words from four different morpho-syntactic classes were gathered which varied in the location of stress depending on their morphological structure. 14 native speakers of Gilaki read the target words. The words were then phonologically transcribed and the location of stress was determined. An overview of the data suggested that lexical stress in Gilaki is predominantly word-final; however, the presence of some affixes results in the distribution of non-final stressed words in this language. The data were analyzed within the metrical phonology to reach a generalized account of the varied distribution of stress in Gilaki. Thus, we suggested that stress in Gilaki is either assigned at the level of phonological word in which stress is located on the last syllable of the word, or at the level of phonological phrase in which stress is placed the strong syllable of the leftmost phonological word in the phrase.