The Use of Subjective Pronouns in Spoken and Written Varieties of Standard Persian: A Corpus-Based Comparison

Persian is a Pro-Drop language and allows omission of subjective pronouns. In the present research the use of such pronouns in spoken and written varieties of standard Persian is compared to each other. The data of spoken Persian is gathered from HamBam Corpus of Contemporary Spoken Persian, interviews of oral history projects (Harvard and Artebox), and the talks of Iranian parliament (Majlis). The data for the written variety is gathered from the Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank. Using corpus-based methods, the study showed that there is no prominent difference in using pronouns in the two varieties. It also indicated that more than half of the pronouns in the spoken Persian emerged as subject; whereas it is no more than one third in the written variety. This means that while talking, the speaker uses subjective pronouns mostly to underscore the subject. The results of this research might be useful for Persian word order studies, those of teaching Persian to non-Persians, and exploring discourse elements of spoken Persian.