The Intonation Patterns of Yes/no Questions, WH-Questions, and Echo Questions in Colloquial Persian

The present study is a description of the intonational properties of three different kinds of interrogatives in colloquial Persian: yes/no questions, WH-questions, and echo questions. This study has been done in the framework of the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation, with the help of Praat software and ToBI. The results, which are based on the utterances recorded, show that the Persian Accentual Phrase (AP) with the pitch accent (L+)H* is present in all question types. So the differences among them are because of their Accentual Phrase boundary tones and Intonational Phrases. While WH-questions often end in a low Intonational Phrase boundary tone (l L%), Echo questions end in a high tone (hH%). However, Yes/no questions, whose structures is similar to declaratives’, are characterized by a high Intonational Phrase boundary tone (H%), and have greater pitch syllables. Duration of the Last vowel is considerable in these questions, too.