A Comparison of Relative Clause Extraposition in Persian Travelogues: A Case Study of Three Travelogues

Farsi travelogues are valuable books. Some especially remaining from the 5th century (more than 1000 years ago) have been the subject matter of many studies in a variety of fields including literature, historical and social studies, or even historical architecture studies. Yet, few studies have been carried out from a linguistic viewpoint to show their capacities as a linguistic data source. The current study investigated relative clause extraposition and its motivations as a non-obligatory movement mostly based on functional and discourse criteria. In many languages, the relative clause is mostly a clause acting as a modifier for a head ‘noun phrase’ (NP) located in the 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. Alternatively, 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 such as the grammatical weight of the clause, verb information structure, and a combination of some different factors together. The current study aimed to analyze the motivation of extraposition relative clauses in historical proses.

 In this paper, three travelogues belonging to three different historical periods were studied and compared. They were 1) Nasir Khusraw’s Travelogue (Safarnameh) written in the 5th century AH, 2) Khatay Namih written by Ali Akbar Khatay in the 10th century AH, and 3) Karnameh Safar Be Chin (A Travel record to China) by Mohammad Ali Eslami Nodooshan written in the 14th century AH. All relative clauses were extracted based on systematic sampling which covered nearly more than half of each book, and 221 relative clauses were finally extracted. All relative clauses were grouped into 2 main categories based on their position in the sentence: 1) canonical relative clauses which appeared right after the head of NP they modify; and 2) those extraposed to the end of the sentence after the main verb. The extraposed relative clauses were analyzed based on their head NP role in the main and subordinate clause, verb information structure, and grammatical weight.

Comparing the three books, the rate of relative clause extraposition was higher in Nasir Khosraw’s Travelogue and Karnameh Safar Be Chin since both are simple proses, and less relative clause extraposition was seen in Khatay Namih which is a technical prose.
All extraposed relative clauses were analyzed to figure out the head NP role in the main and subordinate clauses. The findings suggest that in the main clause, most extraposed clauses modify subject and object NP according to accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977); yet some different patterns were also observed in subordinate clauses. In Nasir Khosraw’s Travelogue, the top position was occupied by object NP instead of subject NP while in Khatay Namih and Karnameh Safar Be Chin, the object of preposition was placed in the second position showing a little deviation of accessibility hierarchy. Head NP definiteness was also studied in all extraposed relative clauses of these three travelogues. In Persian, unlike some languages such as German or English, there is no limitation on head NP definiteness and all types of NPs can be used in this position. However, only 4% of head NPs were pronouns. This means that although using the pronoun as a head NP is not ungrammatical in Persian, it was not very common neither in Nasir Khosraw’s Travelogue and Khatay Namih, nor in Karnameh Safar Be Chin which is a contemporary text. This book has also the greater rate of using relative clauses as a modifier of adjunct position in subordinate clauses and higher grammatical weight of extraposed relative clauses. Such differences between Khatay Namih and two other travelogues suggest a significant agreement between stylistics claim about technical prose and linguistic analyses concerning the role of relative clause extraposition in facilitating the understanding of the text.The Vverb information structure is another extraposition motivator mentioned in the literature. It is supposed that when the verb of the main clause has old-given information, it is most likely for the relative clause to be extraposed and the idea is supported by findings in the current study. In Nasir Khosraw’s Travelogue, 50%, in Khatay Namih, 51%, and in Karnameh Safar Be Chin, 76% of relative clauses were extraposed from the main clauses with linking verbs. These connecting verbs are supposed to bear old-given information.The last factor studied in this paper was the relative clause grammatical weight. Based on Francis (2010) “grammatical weight refers to the length and/or complexity of a phrase concerning the other phrases in the same sentence” (P. 6) and “it can be calculated by the number of verb immediate constituent to word-ratios” (P. 12). Comparing these three travelogues, the average length of extraposed relative clauses was higher in Khatay Namih which is a technical prose, and less in Nasir Khosraw’s Travelogue and Karnameh Safar Be Chin both representing simple proses. Based on the rate of extraposed relative clause, the rate of using relative clauses as a modifier of adjunct position in subordinate clauses, and higher grammatical weight of extraposed relative clauses, a number of differences were observed between Khatay Namih and the other two travelogues supporting the stylistics claim about technical proses and linguistics analyses regarding the role of relative clause extraposition in facilitating the understanding of a text.