The interface of prosody and pragmatics: A phono-pragmatic analysis of bebin (‘look’) in Persian

Abstract

This study examines the phono-pragmatic properties of bebin (‘look’) in Persian within the framework of Interactive Grammar (IG), focusing on its prosodic characteristics and various pragmatic functions in interaction. Specifically, it explores how variations in prosodic features (duration, f0, and intensity) correlate with the four primary functions of bebin: directive, attention signal, discourse marker, and interjection. The findings highlight the dynamic interplay between prosody and pragmatics, demonstrating how prosodic cues facilitate pragmatic interpretation and how pragmatic functions influence prosodic realization. Moreover, the study provides evidence of a systematic relationship between phonetic reduction and grammaticalization, with increased phonetic reduction observed in more grammaticalized uses of bebin. This contributes to broader discussions on the role of prosody in linguistic change. The study also addresses challenges related to functional overlap and polysemy, offering insights into the complexities of interactive discourse. Finally, the quantifiable nature of the analysis makes it highly applicable to computational linguistics, particularly in training language models for corpus annotation and enhancing pragmatic understanding in natural language processing. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd