Cooptation and the Relative Clauses in Persian

Authors
H. Azmoudeh 1
M. Amoozadeh 2
1 PhD student of Linguistics, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
2 Professor of Linguistics, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
Abstract
This paper sets out to investigate the feasibility of replacement of restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses at discourse level in Persian. Givon (2001) believes that proper names, pronouns and unique definite nouns cannot be modified by restrictive relatives. On the other hand, it is usually stated that the modification of indefinite nouns by non-restrictive relatives would result in ungrammatical sentences. This study, however, provides examples from the Persian language arguing against such propositions. Furthermore, there are also evidences in Persian showing that the emotive and expositive information, which are usually expressed by non-restrictive relatives, may also be expressed by restrictive relative clauses. The main inquiry will, then, be how such discourse possibilities would be accounted. To this end, the current paper aims to study and analyze the above-mentioned discourse situations within Discourse Grammar (DG) framework, as introduced by Heine and et al (2013). For the analysis, the empirical data are gathered from the different spoken and written sources in Persian as well as some other instances based on the authors’ own observations and their intuitions.
In short, on the basis of Discourse Grammar, this paper argues that the discourse situations allowing such possibilities can be explained in terms of Cooptation mechanism, an important notion in Discourse Grammar which explain the interaction between sentence grammar and thetical grammar. Furthermore, unlike Heine and et al (2013), it is shown that Cooptation may be a bidirectional operation. In a sense, the paper provides some examples and explanation for the non-unidirectionality of cooptation mechanism such as appositive phrases and Ezafe constructions in Persian.

Keywords

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Language Related Research
Volume 8, Issue 4
September and October 2017
Pages 239-263