An Investigation of Vowel Raising in Persian: The Case of “ɒ” in “-n”

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Shiraz University, Iran

Abstract

Raising vowel is one of the phonological process in Persian in various forms presented in this study. One of these forms is raising low back vowel “ɒ” before alveolar nasal “n”. In this study to analyze the process in the frame work of Optimality, Using “AntConc” words ending in “-ɒn” have been extracted from a part of Persian corpus (Hamshahri 2) with about fifteen million words. The study shows that “ɒ” raising before coronal nasal consonant can be analyzed as a general constraint (*-ɒn) which does not appear before coronal nasal consonants in syllable boundary or within syllable. In the present study , It has been analyzed that the constraint has been violated in some cases presented in this study. Some of the constraints presented and analyzed in this study are “specific words”, “idioms newly translated”, “borrowed words and expressions” and the stem of tavanestan (can). In this study it has been shown that Optimality Theory can account for both those vowel raising being applied and those can not be to applied to.

Keywords

References

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Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Volume 3, Issue 12
March 2016
Pages 67-84

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