Syntactic resemblance in the derivation of Persian relative and adverbial clauses

The syntactic parallelism between relative clauses and adverbial clauses in English has led researchers to hypothesize that both types of clauses may share a common derivation process. While Persian relative clauses follow a different derivation pattern from English, the syntactic resemblance between Persian relative and adverbial clauses suggests a uniform derivation process. This study seeks to apply the analysis of relative clauses to adverbial clauses by adopting the most effective available approach to clarify the derivation of Persian relative clauses. One challenge lies in the absence of “-i” in the DP head, and another is the lack of a gap or resumptive pronoun. Findings indicate that the absence of the pronoun in certain temporal and conditional clauses is attributed to relativization within prepositional phrases, allowing for an ellipsis of the entire PP within the clause by analogy with the outer PP, when specific conditions are met. Non-restrictive relative clauses containing “in” (this) represent another category of adverbial clauses resulting from the relativization of an event argument. Given that this element occupies a functional projection, no gap or resumptive pronoun seems to be present. Notably, in this category of adverbial clauses, the DP head is null due to the definiteness of the nominal head. Furthermore, Persian language data validate the proposition that all adverbial clauses are PPs. Unlike English, Persian typically distinctly presents the corresponding preposition and its accompanying noun element.