Word and Phrase Stress in Persian Language: Optimality Theory

The present paper studies the stress pattern of Persian language at the word and syntactic phrase level and shows that in the framework of prosodic phonology lexical stress in Persian follows a consistent pattern. The lexical stress in Persian follows the phonological word stress rule (that is right-most), but in accounting for phrasal stress, reference to syntactic information and internal constituent structure of the syntactic constituent is inevitable. Head avoidance principle (Eslami 1379, 1384) clearly explains this issue. The present research therefore uses this principle for analyzing the data. This paper also examines the Optimality Theoretic (OT) grammar of phonological word, clitic group and phonological group’s prosodic pattern. In this regard, the research data are analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory, and a grammar is presented benefitting from Optimality violable constraints.