Persian Indefinite Determiner –i and Phonological Phrase

Differential behavior of clitics in various languages makes them interesting from a phonological point of view. Nespor and Vogel [1986] suggest that the structure of clitic groups is not the same inphonological words and phonological phrases. They are in an independent prosodic level. However,in some Romance varieties, clitics fall in the domain stress so that they adjoin to a prosodic word, or they construct another single PWd. Therefore, this paper tries to shed a light on the realization of Persian indefinite determiner –i in the prosodic hierarchy regarding its inherent stressless nature. The indefinite determiner –i is prosodically deficient in the sense in which it does not have PWord structure and it must be incorporated into some other constituent in the prosodic structure. It is not followed by the stress shift on right side, and the host only at Persian phrasal level is the best place tobe joined because the leftmost phonological word is satisfied by the stress pattern of –i. This is compatible with Peperkamp's [1997] claim of different incorporation sites of clitics and Selkirk's [1995] analysis of different prosodic structures of a function word