California Linguistic Notes Vol 41(1), Spring 2017 Nima Sadat-Tehrani Centennial College, Canada Expressing Concession by Means of Nuclear Pitch Accent The purpose of this research is to introduce a certain function of the nuclear pitch accent in Persian, i.e., the expression of concession. A nuclear pitch accent in this usage serves as a preface to a following statement, in which the speaker offers an alternative or contradictory point of view towards a previously highlighted discourse. This nuclear pitch accent is on a final verbal element in the utterance, and crucially, this final element is not associated with any pitch accent in the normal declarative reading of the same utterance, and it is only in this structure that it becomes nuclear-accented. Thus, the nuclear pitch accent behaves here as an intonational morpheme, but one that is bound to its location in the utterance. The paper also investigates the occurrence of this phenomenon in monoclausals, biclausals, and scrambled sentences, and identifies the constraints on its realization. Keywords: Persian, intonation, nuclear pitch accent, concession, contrast. 1. Introduction This paper explores an intonation pattern in modern colloquial Persian. The meaning conveyed by this pattern is that of concession or contradiction directed towards a proposition highlighted in the previous discourse, and it acts as an introduction to an upcoming assertion. What makes this pattern unique is the location of the nuclear pitch accent (NPA), i.e., the last pitch accent in an intonational phrase, a.k.a. sentence stress. Consider the ordinary declarative in Example (1) accompanied by its pitch track and wave form in Figure 1. The stressed syllable in each accentual phrase (AP) is shown with an accent mark, and the NPA is underlined. 1 (1) hævá æbrí !od–". weather cloudy become.PST–PTCP.3SG ‘The weather has become cloudy.’ 1 An overview of Persian intonation is provided in section 2. The example utterances are recorded by the author, a native speaker of Persian, and Canavan and Zipperlen’s (1996) corpus of over 25 hours of spontaneous phone conversations has been implemented to extend the evidential base of the paper. The voice analysis software used is Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2016).