Intonation of vocatives in Persian

Present study tries to investigate the phonological representation of vocatives in Persian in the framework of Auto-segmental Metrical Phonology. Despite the fact that the alignment of pitch accents with lexically stressed syllables is a language specific property in Persian, previous studies have claimed that the changing the stressed syllables in nouns from last to first syllable is the only reason to turn the nouns to vocative case. Contrary to the literature, this study rejects the occurrence of pitch accent on first syllable. The intonation pattern of ^H +X* H-(L%&H%) is suggested for vocatives in Persian in which pitch accent (*) is aligned with last lexically stressed syllable in nouns and X stands for different types of picth accents which is H* in broad focus and L+H* in narrow focus. ^H represents an early peak prior to the pitch accent and high phrase tone H- represents the incompleteness of the utterance by the speaker. Normally, vocative nouns are not ended to boundary tones; therefore, the boundary tones (L% &H%) are in parenthesis to be used, if a vocative noun is an intonational unit in itself. Acoustic analyses and perceptual tests support the findings of this study.