Accusative Case Marker “rā” in the Persian Language: A Corpus-Based Description

The postposition “rā” is syntactically an accusative case marker in the Persian language. Accompanying the case marker “rā” with the direct object is mandatory for some verbs, but in other cases, transitivity defines the presence or absence of “rā”. According to Hopper and Thompson (1980), transitivity is considered a continuous concept and is a feature of the clause (and not only a feature of the verb). Then, in addition to the verbs, the subject and object in a sentence also play a role in transitivity. Accordingly, if the object of an active verb is a proper noun, human (animate), objective or singular, and countable and referable noun, the clause is more transitive. This research studies the postposition “rā” in Persian based on Hopper and Thompson. We assume that there should be a relationship between the presence of “rā” and the transitivity of the clause. To investigate this hypothesis, we used the “Persian dependency treebank” (Rasouli et al., 2013). This corpus contains about half a million words and thirty thousand sentences. There are twenty thousand objects in this corpus. The findings showed that the inanimate singular nominal objects are the most frequent object accompanied with “rā”, and definite nouns and object pronouns tend to be associated with “rā” more than indefinite nouns.