Typological Study of Resumptive Pronouns in Persian Relative Clause

Document Type : Original Article

Author

• Hamed Mowlaei

Assistance professor in Linguistics and Translation Studies Department, Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan, Rafsanjan, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22067/jlkd.2021.70621.1033

Abstract

Resumptive pronouns (henceforth RP) can be used in the relative structure of some languages. RP, in this respect, refers to a personal pronoun co-indexed with the head of relative structure, used in the subordinate clause. In this paper, I try to investigate the typological features of Persian RP in headed relative clauses based on some universals. The first goal of this paper is determining the process of making RP in Persian headed relative clauses. As there are three universal approaches in this term, including base-generation, movement and processing based. As the second goal, I want to review the results of Keenan & Comeri (1977) for Persian pronoun retention strategy. The results show that, for the first goal, Persian RP base-generated in its original position within the relative clause. (a) Using complementizer (ke) at the beginning of every headed relative clause, (b) having strong island structure in relative clause, and (c) the same reading of the of relative clause in both gap and pronoun retention strategies, are three main reasons for considering Persian as a language with base-generated RP procedure. Findings of the second goal indicate that Keenan & Comeri’s Accessibility hierarchy for pronoun retention of Persian can be modified in two aspects. While Keenan & Comeri (1977) claimed Persian necessarily uses only gap strategy in subject position of relative clause, this paper presents some relative clauses which use pronoun retention strategy (optionally and obligatory) in this position. Furthermore, according to Keenan & Comeri (1977) using pronoun retention strategy in complement position of Persian is obligatory. But some evidences, presented here, show that in some object-complement & complement-complement relative clauses which use special category of verbs, pronoun retention strategy is optional.

Keywords

• Typology
• relative structure
• headed relative clause
• resumptive pronoun Persian

20.1001.1.20087233.1400.13.1.5.4

Main Subjects

• Linguistic typology

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