An Analysis of Vowel Raising in Sabzevari Persian within Generative Phonology

In this research, various types of vowel raising in Sabzevari dialect are analyzed in different contexts in the framework of Generative Phonology (Chomsky & Halle, 1968). The main concern in this paper is to investigate various phonological contexts in which vowel raising takes place in this dialect. The data of this research are collected via two sources: written sources about Sabzevari dialect and recorded speech of some Sabzevari speakers. To this end, the phonological and phonetic forms of the data were first compared to one another and analyzed afterwards. Standard Persian was taken as evidence in this research. The results of this research reveal that vowel raising applies in two different phonological contexts: when low or mid vowels are adjacent to high consonants, that is to say, alveo-palatal, palatal and velar consonants. and when mid or low vowels are adjacent to nasal consonants. Overall, nine types of vowel raising take place in Sabzevari dialect.