A Discourse-Pragmatic Functional Study of Pitch Range Variations in Samples of Real Speech in Persian: An Acoustic Study

One of the unresolved issues in the field of intonational phonology is whether pitch accent range differences are used by speakers to convey different pragmatic meanings. In Persian, as in some other languages, a rising-falling nuclear pitch contour – i.e. a rising pitch accent associated with the utterance-final stressed syllable followed by a Low boundary tone – can be used to convey three different pragmatic meanings depending on its pitch range properties: information structure, illucutionary force, presupposition and turn taking in conversation. The given prosodic features carry important information in speech in particular contexts. Acoustic cues are used to decode hidden aspects of messages in speaker s speech. PRAAT (Boersma and Weenink, 2006) is used to describe detailed acoustic knowledge on how an utterance is modulated when a Persian speaker’s emotion deviates from neutral to certain attitudinal states. We analyze the proposed set of spectral parameters related to speech prosody i.e. the duration and the pitch range as a Discourse-Pragmatic Function. This study has no statistical aspect and it is confined to the pragmatic functions of FO in speech. Pierrehumbert s model (1980) is the basic scheme for acoustic analysis. Results showed that there exists correlation between pitch range variation and information structure, illocutionary force, presupposition and turn taking in Persian.