The Study of Persian and French Relative Structure Based on the Typology and Contrastive Linguistics Interaction

This article is going to provide a contrastive analysis of Persian and French relative structure based on typological criterion for facilitating the process of learning French by Persian speaking learners. For this sake, Persian and French relative structure is studied from syntactic perspective based on contrastive analysis hypothesis. The results of contrasting syntactic structure show that Persian and French as two Indo-European languages have external-headed and postnominal relative structure. This means that Relative clause is embedded to the main clause in both languages . Furthermore, the position of Persian and French in the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (presented by Keenan & Comeri 1977) is almost the same. However, relative marker, relativization strategies and Relative clause extrapositon are the main syntactic differences of two languages. Persian uses just one complementizer (ke) as its relative marker but French has 6 relative markers which are either relative pronoun or complementizer. Persian has gap and pronoun retention strategies while French uses just relative pronoun strategy. Furthermore, French Relative clause has more constraints for being extraposed to postverbal position in comparison to Persian one. As the last point, Relative clauses are linguistic habit in French and have a higher frequency of usage than Persian Relative clause.