Nuclear Pitch Accent and Syntactic Movement

Nuclear pitch accent is the last element in a sentence that receives a pitch accent in languages like English. The word bearing nuclear accent is usually perceived as more prominent than the rest of the sentence. While nuclear pitch accent usually (but not always) falls on the last word of the Intonational Phrase in English, it often falls on non-final elements (e.g., the object) in verb-final languages such as Persian, Turkish, and German. An interesting theoretical question is how the position of nuclear accent is determined and why it follows similar patterns across languages. Among existing theories of nuclear accent assignment, an important point of divergence is whether accent assignment is sensitive to surface syntactic structure alone or it is affected by prior syntactic movements as well.  I take the theories of Cinque (1993) and Kahnemuyipour (2009)—both of which are purely surface-based—as a starting point and offer an alternative account in two steps. First, I provide novel data from Persian specific objects as well as certain types of scrambling to challenge the surface-based assumption and argue for the relevance of syntactic movements. As the second step, I argue that once we accept the movement-sensitivity of accent assignment, if we also assume the anti-symmetry of syntax (Kayne 1994)—as some existing theories of nuclear accent assignment already do (e.g., Zubizarreta 1998, Kahnemuyipour 2009)—and take nuclear pitch accent to be final by default, we may already be in possession of a fully-fledged theory of nuclear pitch accent assignment. I offer arguments in favor of this alternative theory and against existing ones using novel data involving Persian adverbs, PPs, and specific objects.