Investigating Different Linguistic Levels in the Case of Stress Pattern in Persian and French

In the framework of contrastive linguistics the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the points of divergenceand convergence in the case of stress pattern in French and Persian. The term stress is used in phonetics to referto the degree of force used in producing a syllable. The current research seeks to answer the followingquestions: what are the most typical kinds of stress in both languages What are the most substantialcomponents of this supra segmental feature in both languages Research methodology is descriptive-analytical.The findings of this research are divided into several parts. In Persian when facing this prosodic phenomenon, itcan distinguish three types of stress. The lexical stress falls on the last syllable with a few cases of exception,the phrasal stress and pitch accent. Distinctive and contrastive functions are the main functions of stress inPersian and their places depending on morpho-syntactic properties are variable .In French, the stress falls on thelast syllable of an isolated word or a group of words called rhythmic group: stress of the rhythmic group fallsalways on the last syllable of a syntactic groups and it does not have the distinctive function, by contrast, it hasthe demarcative function and finally pitch accent that varies according to the intonation of the sentence whosechange is bounded by syntactic and semantic criteria. Furthermore, the acoustic components of stress in twolanguages are different. In Persian, the stress is as a result of differences in fundamental frequency, pitch,intensity and duration, but in French language, the changes in duration, and intensity as the acoustic realizationof demarcative stress in one hand, and the variations in intensity, duration and timbre as the acoustic features ofcontrastive stress on the other hand have the important roles, it means that the length of the syllable plays thekey role in the realization of this prosodic phenomenon in French language.

کلیدواژه ها:

stress ، French language ، Persian language ، contrastive analysis ، contrastive function ، teaching Persian to nonspeakersof Persian