The Role of Typological features of Relative Structure on Determining Persian Word Order

The writers have two goal for this study; first, Investigating Persian Relative structures according to universal featuresUsing these universal features for predicting Persian word order is the second goal of present study. So, in the first part, concentration is on the syntactic and pragmatics structure and features of Persian Relative clauses. Finding of this part showed that there are both headed and headless Relative clauses in Persian, although – as like as most other languages- headed Relative clauses are more frequent. Head of Relative structure in Persian is always out of modifying clause which is embedded within main clause. Since modifying clause in Persian always follows the head, Persian selects the postnominal Relative structures among five universal possibilities. Furthermore, the results of this part indicated that Persian uses the first and second method of Relativization among these four ways: gap, resumptive pronoun, pronoun retention and full noun phrase. In the second part and after discussing the role of Relative structures in word order determination, investigation of Persian Relative structure’s characteristics for predicting its word order features is presented. Based on the finding of this part, it is claimed that Persian must be a SVO language according to Greenberg (1963), Vennemann (1973) and Lehmann (1974) but it could be SOV or SVO language according to Dryer (2005).