Juncture: Pause or Boundary?

In western linguistics, ‘juncture’ is a technical term in phonetics which has its roots in American structuralism. Besides phonetics, the term is especially important in the areas of speech perception in psycholinguistics, text to speech conversion, and speech recognition in computational linguistics. In Persian phonetics and phonology, the equivalent chosen for the term ‘juncture’ has led to the misconception that it is equal to ‘pause’. This article is a review of some influential works in western linguistics, with the purpose of determining the exact meaning of the term ‘juncture’ and the phonetic features that are discussed under the title of juncture. It is argued that the chosen equivalent in Persian is not appropriate, as it implies the meaning of ‘pause’ and this is not the intended meaning of juncture in western linguistics. Showing a number of phonetic features that mark the boundaries of grammatical units in Persian, the equivalent of ‘boundary’ is suggested as a replacement.