Relative clause extraposition in Persian narrative text with a functional approach: Evidence from fifth to seventh volumes of Tārix-e Bayhaqi

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Abstract

Relative clause extraposition happens whenever relative clause moves from its normal position - near the head - to the final position of the sentence. Analyzing relative clause extraposition has taken great attention since the functional grammar appeared. Due to the fact that Persian sentences remain grammatical in the case of occurrence or non-occurrence of this process, most linguists believe that this movement has a non-syntactic motivation. The goal of the present research was to study the relative clause extraposition in Tārix-i Bayhaqi as a historical text of modern Persian. So, the comparison between the results of this process in narrative and literary Persian texts with formal ones could be possible. Tārix-i Bayhaqi narrates the Ghaznaviyān dynasty events and it is one of the most valid Persian historical texts. Having hypothesized that extraposition has functional reasons such as informative structure, relative clause length, having the same verb in the main and relative clause and the kind of verb, 150 relative clauses were selected through random cluster sampling from fifth to seventh volumes of Tārix-i Bayhaqi. From the 150 relative clauses, there were 66 extraposed ones which were investigated according to the four functional reasons. Findings of this research showed that except the first one, the other three functional reasons have direct effect on the relative clause extraposition. Actually, the relative clause length was the most effective factor in relative clause extraposition in bayhaghi history. This verifies the Howkins’ claim on the tendency of the heavy constituents in verb final languages to move to the end of the sentence and occur after the verb. Comparing these results with Rāsekhmahand et al (1391), it becomes clear that there is not a significant difference between the function of the relative clause extraposition in modern formal Persian and in the historical Bayhaghi text.
 

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References

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Persian Language and Iranian Dialects
Volume 1, Issue 1 - Serial Number 1
Serial 1
July 2016
Pages 45-69

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