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Article published In: Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 40:2 (2017) ► pp.135–149

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Relative clauses in Persian

A small-scale corpus study

 | University of Calgary
 | University of Tehran
Published online: 26 February 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00001.abd
Abstract
This study is a corpus-based investigation of Persian relative clauses (RCs) used in written mode. 535 instances of RCs occurring in 1634 sentences in 40 editorials of four newspapers published in Iran were spotted and analyzed to determine the frequency of each RC type and the occurrence of certain features including complementizer ke, object marker râ, different representations of the relativised element in the modifying clause, and the status of gap and resumptive pronoun in the RC. The results indicated that subject RCs are the most frequent types. The tendency to use object marker râ before the modifying RC (Karimi, S. (2001). Persian complex DPs: how mysterious are they? Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 461, 63–96. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) was confirmed. Besides, some tokens were witnessed contrasting Taghvaipour, M. A. (2005). Persian relative clauses in head-driven phrase structure grammar. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, England.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar proposals on the ungrammaticality of resumption in Persian subject ordinary and object free RCs and the necessity of prefix hær- ‘ever’ in all Persian free RCs.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Review of the literature
    • 1.1Relative clauses in Persian
    • 1.2Two major types of RCs
    • 1.3Representation of the relativized element inside RC
    • 1.4Post-verbal RCs
  • 2.This study
    • 2.1The corpus
    • 2.2Methodology
  • 3.Results and discussions
  • Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
References (14)
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Seifi, Pouran, Hanneke Loerts & Pim Mak
2024. The effects of restrictiveness on relative clause processing in Farsi. Acta Psychologica 247 ► pp. 104299 ff. DOI logo
Solaimani, Ehsan, Florence Myles & Laurel Lawyer
2024. Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English. Second Language Research 40:3 ► pp. 481 ff. DOI logo

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