Pseudo-Complex Clauses in Persian and Their Constructing Strategies

Morphologic adverbs can be syntactically and semantically defined and classified in different ways. They have basically attributive functions. Having various meanings, their structural functions might be expressed via adverbial phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adverbial clauses. In Persian, noun phrases or prepositional phrases, in most cases, perform this adverbial function. These phrases can have various dependents, including “clauses” starting with nominal or prepositional heads, such as “vaqt.ike” (the time that/when), “jā.ike” (the place that/where), “be mahz.e in ke” (in the instant that/as soon as), “darhāl.ike” (in the state that/whereas), "be xāter.e in ke" (for the reason that/because), “hamchenānke” (the same that/as), and “be goone.ike” (in the manner that). These phrases are usually regarded as “complex conjunctions”, “complex coordinators”, or "complex subordinators” in the grammar books and many other resources. Accordingly, relative or complement clauses inside noun phrases and prepositional phrases are considered to be adverb clauses. However, they are structurally part of noun phrases or prepositional phrases with an adverbial function. Therefore, such a construction cannot be regarded as a complex sentence. Anyway, we call them “strategies of constructing pseudo-complex clauses” when distinguishing between these cases and relativization in the subject and object. In this descriptive research, the adverbial concepts were classified into 19 groups (10 main groups and 9 subgroups). It seemed that there was also a direct relation between the overt expressions of “ke” (that) and the possibility of clause dislocation. Moreover, as the various examples showed, an “infinitive” in Persian could be a “deranked verb” though it was a noun without morphosyntactic properties of a verb. The research data were extracted from 3000 minutes of various television and radio programs of the Iranian National Media in the period of June 2021 to February 2022 with a focus on adverb clauses.