The Study of the roles of "ke" in Persian relative clauses: a typological approach

Abstract“ke” as a multi functional morpheme used in spoken and written Persian language performs several different usages such as indefinite pronoun,complementizer,focus marker…as well as a relativizer which introduces Relative Clauses without undergoing any change but accepting various roles.This study aims to look into the syntactic,semantic and pragmatic roles of “ke” in Persian relative clauses.To give a somehow sufficient description of “ke”,a careful study of a natural corpus in which this phenomenon is used is necessary.Therefore,for an efficient research,data has been collected from the natural occuring sentences of spoken and written Persian.Thereafter,”ke” is studied syntactically, semantically and pragmatically in Relative Clauses. This article which is descriptive-analytic is done within the typological framework based on the work of Comrie(1989) to answer the question of “which syntactic,semantic and pragmatic roles does “ke” have in Persian relative clauses?The main hypothesis considers all grammatical functions for “ke”.According to the findings of this research “ke” manifests all the same grammatical roles such as subject,object…as a noun phrase does.It plays many different semantic roles like agent,patient,goal….Moreover,“ke” can follow any structure to focus as a focus marker with both old and new information.Key words: relative clause, relativizer, semantic roles, new information, old information.