Prosodic Representation of Information Structure in the Narrative Discourse of the Monolingual Persian-speaking Adults

Research showed that in some languages, speakers accent new referents and deaccent given referents. The research also indicated that the pitch accent type used to mark accessible referents is like that used to accent given referents. The goal of the present study was to investigate the different pitch accent patterns used to mark different information status (new, given, accessible and identifiable) in the narrative discourse of the monolingual Persian- speaking adults. Moreover, since no research has been done on the intonational patterns of accessible and identifiable referents in Persian, pitch accent and intonational pattern of these referents were also investigated. To these aims, 10 monolingual Persian-speaking adults were encouraged to narrate stories based on 8 picture stories in which information status of referents were carefully controlled. The stories were labeled to determine whether they included target words, full NP, pronouns. The subjects’ pitch accent patterns were identified using Praat software. Findings of the study revealed that the most frequent accent types used to mark new, given and accessible referents were  L+(H*) H+(L*) and H*+L respectively. It was also found out that there was no specific accent type to mark identifiable referents in Persian. Based on the results, it could be suggested that there was a specific relationship between information status and pitch accent types in the subjects’ narrative discourse.