The Effect of Grammatical Weight on Postposing in Persian

This paper aims to investigate postposing in Modern spoken Persian. Persian is a verb-final language; however, some constituents frequently follow the verb and appear in the post - verbal domain. Among the factors motivating this phenomenon, one of them is grammatical weight. The universal tendency proposed by typologists is the “short-before-long principle”; locating the heavy constituents after the light ones in order to ease the process of production and comprehension. Some studies advocate the position of long constituents before short ones in verb-final languages like Japanese and Korean. Based on the Persian spoken corpus, this research analyzes the postposed constituents according to their grammatical weight. It is observed that the heavier constituents are postposed more easily compared with the light ones; supporting the universal trend of placing heavy constituents after the light ones.