The Behavior of Farsi Multiple Interrogatives; Superiority Effect Perspective

Articles in Press

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Author
M. pahlavannezhad
Linguistics Department, Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Ferdowsi University, Mashhad, Iran.
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the behavior of Farsi multiple interrogatives from the perspective of Superiority Effect (SE). Adopting the Minimalist Program (MP) approach, the presented research and the suggested analysis provides a critique of some extant studies on wh-movement in Farsi Multiple interrogatives and the effect of SE on this type of movement. In contrast to Bošković's (1999) view that Focus Languages do not demonstrate SE, this study shows that Multiple Interrogatives in Farsi, a focus language, indeed demonstrate SE. With this purpose and adopting a descriptive design, in the present study, sample multiple interrogative sentences in Farsi were collected from two sources. The first was previously valid multiple interrogatives studies and the second was the samples that the researcher fabricated for the purpose of analysis. The reliability of the data from the first source is followed from the reliability of the source studies. The reliability of the data from the second source was established by the researcher’s linguistic intuition as a native speaker of Farsi. The data were then analyzed according to the Minimalist Program, and in particular, in terms of wh-movement and SE on this type of movement. The results revealed that unlike previous studies (e.g., Kahnemuyipour, 2001) that fail to explain SE violation cases in Farsi and rules out some varieties of multiple interrogative constructions in Farsi in terms cases of Superiority Condition Violation (SUV), to resolve the problem, a syntactic license was proposed to explain SUV in wh-movement in Farsi multiple interrogatives.

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Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 13 July 2025