A Typological Analysis of Relativisation Strategies in Farsi and German

Document Type : research article

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of German Language and Literature, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

In German, a relative clause is marked by relative pronoun, which agrees with
their head noun in gender and number. However, relative clauses in Farsi are
always introduced by using a conjunction “ke”. This difference could be Iranian
and German learners when learning languages, German and Farsi to confront
difficulties. The present study focuses on relativisation strategies based on
typological analysis and tries to show how relative clauses use these strategies
and where the place of Farsi and German in these categories is? The results of
this study will demonstrate that German using relative pronoun strategy which
is a kind of pronoun-retention strategies. However, the syntactic role of head
noun in relative clause in Farsi is marked with various strategies, including gap
strategy and personal pronoun strategy.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Foreign Language Research
Volume 3, Issue 1 - Serial Number 1
Spring & Summer
April 2014
Pages 61-76

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