Correlation between prosody and pragmatics: A case study of the discourse marker hālā `now' in Persian
The Persian discourse marker hālā ('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 hālā in spoken Persian, examining 267 instances from spontaneous conversations. While temporal uses were present, they were often combined with other discourse ma…