Preferred Argument Structure in Persian

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Abstract

This research used the framework of Du Bois (1980, 1987, 2003 and 2006) to investigate the phenomenon of ergativity and its relation to patterns of surface grammar and information flow in discourse. The corpus for this study comprised a set of narratives about a short film, as told by speakers of Persian. First the key grammatical, morphological and information states of all the full NPs in argument positions were statistically examined. After recognizing the Preferred Argument Structure in Persian discourse, which appeared as the speakers' tendencies in distribution of full NPs with new information, it was concluded that the tendency resulted in a preferred pattern corresponding to the grammatical pattern of ergativity in case system. In other words, Persian speakers preferentially put the lexical arguments and new mentions in "S" and "O" positions and not in "A" position. Next the two other discourse tendencies i.e. Topic Continuity and Topic Animacy were examined to show that the dominant case pattern of Persian is a consequence of competition among different discourse factors. Therefor it was noted that, although the Preferred Argument Structure lead Persian in having a discourse ergative pattern, these two tendencies display a nominative/accusative,{A,S}{O}, alignment in successive clauses. Therefore it can be concluded that in discourse there is a motivation for the grammatical phenomenon of ergativity.

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References

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