Relative clause extraposition in historical prose text: The NasirKhusraw Travelogue

Abstract

The NasirKhusraw Travelogue as the very first Farsi travelogue remaining from 5th century (more than 1000 years ago) has been subject of many studies in a variety of fields including literature, historical and social studies, or even historical architect studies. Yet few studies have been carried out from linguistic viewpoint to show its capacities as a linguistic data source. The current study probes on relative clause extraposition and its motivations as a non-obligatory movement mostly based on functional and discourse criteria. In many languages relative clause is mostly a clause that acts as a modifier for a head Np located in main clause. This modifier clause can appear right after (or based on the language word order before ) the NP that is defined by the clause and in this case it is named canonical relative clause. Or it can be dislocated and be moved to the end of the sentence (named extraposed relative clause) Since there is no syntactic need to force this movement, the motivations of relative clause extraposition were explained to be discourse factors (Francis,2010) such as Grammatical weight of clause (Hawkins,1990 &2004), verb information Structure (Sheykho’l Eslami, 2008) and a combination of some different factors together (Rasekh-Mahand et.al, 2012). Current study aimed to analyze the motivations of extrapositon relative clauses in historical proses. The NasirKhusraw Travelogue was studied and about 230 relative clauses were extracted based on systematic sampling which cover nearly more than half of the book.

Keywords

• relative clause
• relative clause extraposition
• grammatical weight
• travelogue