The Order of Different Types of Adjuncts in Standard Spoken Persian; a Corpus-Based Study

Adjunct is an optional or secondary element used in a sentence to provide excess information about the action, participants, time, place, etc. The present paper studied the application and order of different types of adjuncts in the standard spoken Persian. Using corpus-based methods, the study showed that the usage of adjuncts is more than that of other main constituents (i.e. subject, verb, internal arguments), and it is used in all places of clause. Additionally, the types of descriptive, time, place, manner and quantity are the most used adjuncts in the standard spoken Persian with adjunct of time applied mostly at the beginning of the clause and around subject, and the descriptive one used dominantly in the middle of the clause and alongside verb and internal arguments. Accordingly, based on the type of adjuncts their places in clause, it can be concluded that expressing the time of an action for Persian speaker is the foremost priority in the spoken variety. The results can be useful to studies exploring word order in Persian language, differences of spoken and written varieties, and discourse analysis.