The Study of Stress in Ilami Kurdish Verbs

Stress is one of the important phonological concepts regarding syllable. The purpose of this study is to analyze the stress in Ilami Kurdish verbs within the framework of Hayes (1995) Metrical theory. In this research, ten verbs were selected and they were pronounced by five male Kurdish speakers with an average age of 40 to 60 and the ability to read and write. Each word was pronounced by the speakers three times. A total number of 150 spectrograms were produced and analyzed by Praat software. Based on the vowels of each word, the basic frequency, intensity and delay were measured up to three decimals. Then SPSS was used for statistical analysis and graphs were drawn using Excel software. In order to perform statistical analysis, tests such as Kolmogorov Smirnov, t-dependent or paired, Wilcoxon and repeated measurements were applied. The results were as follows: In Ilami Kurdish, the causative factor for the production of the lexical stress is the acoustic correlation of the basic frequency and the place of stress is on one of the first syllables of the word.IntroductionAll lexical units in different languages have a "stress scheme" or "specific stress pattern." This means that one of the syllables in a word, called the “stressed syllable,” has more prominence than others. Hayes (1995), based on a nonlinear concept, showed that to describe stress in any language, two points must be made: first, how to organize strong and weak syllables in feet, and second, how to connect feet and build the vocabularies. He illustrated these two features in the form of a tree diagram called metrics. Based on this, he declared that from the combination of syllables, feet are formed, and from the combination of feet, words are formed. Vocabulary structure in all languages is governed by principles as follows: 1. At the level of feet, each foot has only one strong syllable and zero to several weak syllables. It can be said that just as the number of vowels determines the number of syllables in a word, so does the number of strong syllables. 2. At the word level, there is only one foot that is more prominent than the rest. This foot is called strong, and the rest of the feet are called weak. The main stress of the word always appears in this strong foot. 3. The sum of strong nodes in the stressed foot is greater than the sum of strong nodes in each of the other feet.Hayes, based on a nonlinear concept, stated that to describe stress in any language, two points must be made: first, how to organize strong and weak syllables in feet, and second, how to connect feet and build the vocabularies. He illustrated these two features in the form of a tree diagram called metrics. He declared the patterns of stress to be different in different languages and explained these different patterns with four dual-value parameters: 1.The foundations of any language are either right-dominant or left-dominant. 2. The main stress in any language is either bounded or unbounded. 3. The basis of any language is either quantity-sensitive or quantity-insensitive. 4. Foot construction is made in any language either from left to right or right to left. The purpose of this study is to analyze the stress in Ilami Kurdish verbs within the framework of Hayes' (1995) Metrical Theory. This research aims to provide a new perspective on concepts such as stress and the phonological structure of the Ilami Kurdish dialect, paving the way for more research in different fields of linguistics. In this research, we have tried to answer the following two questions: 1. is the status of stress in the verb phrase of the Kurdish language similar to Persian? 2. on which syllable is the main stress in the category of verbs in Ilami Kurdish?Research on stress in the Persian language has been conducted by domestic and foreign researchers. Studies have shown that some foreign scholars, such as Khodzko (1852) and Phillott (1919), believe that the place of stress in the Persian language, in nouns, derivatives, compounds, adjectives (comparative and superlative), infinitives, and verbs, is on the last syllable. Domestic scholars, including Natel Khanlari (1994), Gholam Alizadeh (2001), Mousavi (2007), Islami (2009), and others, have also considered the place of lexical stress in verbs to be the last syllable. Other researchers, like Abolhasanzadeh (2012), Sadeghi (2016, 2022), and Valadimir (2023), have also worked on stress phenomena in Iranian languages. However, little research has been done on the role of stress in different dialects of Kurdish; this issue has not been studied in Ilami Kurdish.MethodologyIn this research, ten verbs were selected and pronounced by five male Kurdish speakers aged 40 to 60, all of whom were literate. Each word was pronounced by the speakers three times. A total of 150 spectrograms were produced and analyzed using Praat software. Based on the vowels of each word, the fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration were measured to three decimal places. Then, SPSS was used for statistical analysis, and graphs were drawn using Excel software. For statistical analysis, tests such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov, dependent t-test or paired t-test, Wilcoxon, and repeated measurements were applied.ConclusionThe process of conducting this research is based on the two basic questions: 1. Is the status of stress in the verb phrase of the Kurdish language the same as in the Persian language? According to the research of some domestic and foreign scholars, foreign scholars such as Khodzko (1852) believe that the place of stress in the Persian language, particularly in verbs, is on the last syllable. Domestic scholars, including Natel Khanlari (1958), Gholam Alizadeh (2001), Mousavi (2007), and Islami (2009), also believe that the place of lexical stress in verbs is on the last syllable. However, according to the results presented in the data analysis section on Kurdish, it seems that in the category of verbs, unlike in Persian, the stress is not on the last syllable. Instead, the stressed syllable in Kurdish is in the initial part of the word. 2. On which syllable is the main stress in the category of verbs in Ilami Kurdish? The Kurdish stressed syllable is located at the beginning of the word. According to the results of statistical tests, in the verb category, stress in two-syllable words is on the first syllable. With the increase in the number of syllables in the word, which occurs by adding affixes, the second syllable is stressed. There is no stress on the affixes, and the stress is always on one of the initial syllables of the simple word. Thus, in Ilami Kurdish, the causative factor for the production of lexical stress is the acoustic correlation of the fundamental frequency, and the place of stress is on one of the first syllables of the word.