Persian Clausal Constituent order Based on Functional Discourse Grammar

This study wants to present a new approach to clausal constituent ordering of Persian. Functional Discourse Grammar as the latest Functional Grammar (2008) is selected as the framework, for this sake. Unlike Greenberg’s typological view (1963), FDG has a dynamic approach for constituent ordering. In this way, there is not any fixed position in clause for language elements already determined; instead, element’s position is determined by its original layer, pragmatic and semantic functions and its superordinated elements in the hierarchy of Interpersonal and Representational levels. Furthermore, FDG rules in this respect are proper for the ordering of phrase and word elements too. However, this study aims to focus only on clausal constituent ordering of Persian. FDG considers four Absolute positions (PI,P2,PM,PF) and unlimited number of Relative position for clausal elements. In its top-down fashion, whenever one of these four Absolute positions are occupied by an element, its Relative ones will be available. In this case there will be 14 logically possible word order correspondences to any of Greenberg’s word order patterns. In other word, FDG introduces 84 word order patterns for Greenberg’s six word order SOV, SVO, OVS, OSV, VOS, and VSO. The results of study show that FDG’s proposals for word order can be applied on Persian as a fairly free ordered language. Furthermore, it is possible to justify Persian scrambling (as the pragmatic intention of speaker) in a based-generated way because FDG does not consider movement. For this sake, Persian short-distance leftward scrambling as a frequent phenomenon is investigated on the basis of pragmatic (not syntactic) considerations in the last part of study.