Correlation between prosody and pragmatics: A case study of the discourse marker h\=al\=a `now' in Persian

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.28359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Persian discourse marker h\=al\=a ('now') exhibits remarkable multifunctionality, extending far beyond its temporal adverbial role to encompass a variety of pragmatic functions. This study presents a pragmatic and acoustic analysis of h\=al\=a in spoken Persian, examining 267 instances from spontaneous conversations. While temporal uses were present, they were often combined with other discourse marker functions, indicating extensive multifunctionality, with 70% of tokens serving two or more pragmatic roles. Textual functions (topic shifting, signaling relationships, boundary marking, attention guidance, topic introduction, and topic emphasis) were most frequent, followed by interactive functions (turn management, listener engagement, and