Iambic Feet

The present article investigates the stress pattern system of Central Sarawani Balochi (CSB), spoken in Sarawan located in Sistan and Baluchestan province of the Islamic Republic of Iran, based on metrical theory as developed in Hayes (1995). Correspondingly, the present research illustrates the position of primary and secondary stress in mono-morphemic words, verbal paradigms, compound words, complex words, pair words and simple transitive as well as intransitive sentences. The linguistic data are mostly based on the purposeful recording of speech gathered through interview and elicitation from the speech of 10 male and female language consultants with different social backgrounds. CSB data highlight that the stress pattern system in this language variety is almost totally systematic; it is a language variety with iambic feet. Further, CSB data show up that stress is culminative at phonological level. It is also rhythmically distributed. The absence of stress assimilation is supported by CSB data as well. Since the location of stress is predictable, its stress pattern is fixed. The data, likewise, confirm that stress system in CSB is a mixture of morphological and rhythmic. Meanwhile, stress pattern in complex words indicate the suffixes attract the primary stress. Besides, in negative and prohibitive forms, prefixes m- and n- get the primary stress.