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The functional explanation of relative clause extraposition in Persian

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Document Type : Research Paper

Abstract

Relative clause extraposition is a structure in which a noun is modified by a non-adjacent relative clause, resulting in a discontinuous dependency. In this paper we try to find out why relative clause extraposition happens in Persian. There are two main functional explanations in the literature, called newness (Huck and Na 1990, 1992; Kuno and Takami 2004), and grammatical weight (Arnold et al 2000, 2004; Hawkins 1994, 2004; Wasow 1997; Yamashita and Chang 2001, Francis 2010). We have considered four different motivations which may affect relative clause extraposition: relative clause weight, main clause verb type, information status of verb and head of relative clause, and the definiteness of the head of the relative clause. The findings of this corpus based study reveal that these different factors do not play the same role in extraposing relative clauses in Persian. The main motivation is the relative length of relative clause and verb phrase. The long relative clauses tend to be extraposed more easily than the short ones. Information status and definiteness do not play a considerable role, while the verb type is also a determining factor. This paper emphasizes on the usefulness of functional explanations and it has some implications for word order typology of Persian.

Keywords

References
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Journal of Researches in Linguistics
Volume 4, Issue 6 - Serial Number 6
August 2012
Pages 21-40
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