Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics

We studied relative clause extraposition in a less studied language. We have shown the role of different factors in relative clause extraposition. The findings are important for typology of SOV languages. a b s t r a c t In recent functional and cognitive literature different motivations are suggested to influence the relative clause extraposition, where the modifying relative clause is not adjacent to the modified head noun. Information status, grammatical weight and verb class are among such motivations. The current corpus-based study of relative clause extraposition attempts to test the prediction of these different motivations in Persian. Using logistic regression analysis, the effects of these various factors on the extraposition of relative clauses are investigated. The findings revealed that, among different influential sources, grammatical weight is the main factor influencing extraposition of relative clauses. Verb class and information status are found to be lower ranked factors, respectively. The analyses demonstrated that with a special verb class, i.e. linking verbs, which predominantly carries given information in discourse, relative clause extraposition happens more freely. The findings support Hawkins' (2004) principle of domain minimization and provide more evidence for the hypothesis that, Persian, a seemingly SOV language, behaves typologically as a VO language, in which the heavy constituents shift rightward to facilitate constituent recognition, similar to other head-initial languages.

Mazandarani, as a local language of Iran, has been studied. The 24 correlations of Dryer (1992) have been evaluated in this language, and it showed that one of them is not applicable in this language, since there was not any instance of that correlation in Mazandarani. According to these correlations, Maznandarani has typically the characteristics of OV languages. In this study, we substantiate this claim, and using a corpus of spoken and written (including TV and radio interviews, articles written in this language and the author’s language instinct), two specific syntactical phenomenon of this language was studied: Extraposition, in which the relative clause extraposed from the canonical status and goes to the end of the sentence and Preposing, in which the prepositional phrase moves out of the canonical status. Extraposition and Preposing are explained in chapter 4, in detail. In the analysis we tried to answer the question that what the main reason for extaposition and preposing in Mazandarani is. With a functional framework, the impact of constituents’ weight, the main clause verb type, verb accessibility and the head, head definiteness, and the head’s animacy on extraposition and preposing have been evaluated, which is explained in chapter 3.Data analysis showed that the impact of the competing motivations (the 5 mentioned factors) is not the same on extraposition and preposing. The weak impact goes to the mean weight of the constituent, comparing the weight of verb. The higher this ratio is the probability of the constituent’s movement increases. Also, the animacy of the head is the main predictor in preposition, after the weight. Then, in both phenomena, verb type is the effectual factor: Copulative and existential verbs are the main predictors of extraposition and the main verbs in preposing is the movement verb., since these verbs’ information structure is old and they move to the end of the sentence. The head’s definiteness and accessibility have not any role in the movement of the constituent.The results of the study focused on examining the status of Mazandarani based on the typological framework, and then explain the importance of the functional explanations. Also, the interaction of several factors on the occurrence of a linguistic phenomenon or competing motivations is highlighted in this study.

Focusing on black women Qadam-Kheyr and Sorur in Mahshid Amirshahi’s novel Dadeh Qadam-Kheyr (1999), this article examines literary representations of the African-Iranian presence, and provides a critique of race and slavery in twentieth-century Iran. In light of the history of the Iranian slave trade until 1928, and the reconstruction of race and gender identities along Eurocentric lines of nationalism in Iran, the novel under scrutiny is a dynamic site of struggle between an “Iranian” literary discourse and its “non-Persian” Others. The “aesthetics of alterity” at the heart of the text is, therefore, the interplay between the repressed title-character Qadam-Kheyr and the resilient minor character Sorur, each registering Amirshahi’s artistic intervention into a forgotten corner of Iranian history.