Word order and stress reconstruction in Persian

• Published in: Glossa (London) Vol. 10; no. 1
• Main Author: Mahdavi Mazdeh, Mohsen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 18.01.2025
• Subjects: Research Article; Persian; antisymmetry; nuclear stress; stress reconstruction; syntactic movement; scrambling
• ISSN: 2397-1835; 2397-1835
• DOI: 10.16995/glossa.11592

This paper offers a new theory of nuclear stress assignment, focusing on data from Persian (an SOV language) and English (an SVO language). The proposed theory bypasses phrases and assigns nuclear stress to the last element of the sentence by default. Deviations from this pattern (which are abundant in Persian) are explained through “stress reconstruction” effects; even non-final elements that receive nuclear stress are base-generated at the lowermost position. Relying on the theory of antisymmetry, it is argued that the syntactic movements that are responsible for the SOV surface order are also responsible for non-final nuclear stress. In this manner, a combination of three assumptions already existing in the literature (antisymmetry, stress reconstruction, and rightmost prominence) is used to account for the Persian stress facts. The argument involves new data that challenge existing accounts of the language. Most importantly, it is shown that Persian ACC -marked objects behave in the same way as other objects in terms of stress assignment. Second, a range of sentence types with nuclear stress on post-verbal elements in Persian are discussed, challenging Kahnemuyipour’s (2004; 2009) phase-based theory, which places nuclear accent on the highest element in the vP phase. Third, it is shown that the stress patterns in Persian scrambled sentences are most easily accounted for through stress reconstruction.