Marking the specific direct object in restrictive relative clauses in spoken Farsi
Sammanfattning: Persian has a case system whereby specific direct objects are marked with the enclitic را =rā. However, the spoken language presents a greater degree of flexibility with regard to =rā marking, especially in complex clauses such as restrictive relative clauses where a head noun can fulfil more than one syntactic function. Previous descriptions of direct object marking in relative clauses in Persian are routinely based on high-register language, e.g. written literature, and they are inconsistent in their observations. This study is an empirical investigation of the distribution of the =rā marker in restrictive relative clauses in spoken Farsi, and of the degrees of acceptance among Farsi speakers of different patterns of this structure. Examples of the target structure are taken from ten modern Iranian films and fifty English-to-Farsi spoken translation tests. These examples are then used in an acceptability judgement test. The findings of this investigation show that there is a considerable disparity between the written restrictive relative clauses studied in previous research and spoken versions of the same structure. More specifically, it is shown that the omission of the =rā marker is common, that the use of referent pronouns seems no longer to be an acceptable feature of the spoken language, and that the use of the =rā marker and its acceptability judgement change according to the syntactic function of the head noun in the sentence.
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