The Study of Relative Clauses in Azeri Turkish and Persian: A Typological Approach

Typology which is one of the dynamic branches of linguistics tries to compare languages and attain generalizations. This approach aims at comparing languages’ structures and revealing systemic patterns of variations existing among them. Word order studies is one of the most important issues in language typology which includes some variations. The order of noun and relative clause is one of those which correlates with the main word order of languages. This study aims to look into relative clauses in Azerbaijani Turkish and compare them with that of Persian. For an efficient research, data has been collected from natural recurring sentences of spoken and written standard Turkish as well as a novel titled Shaman. Afterwards, the data has been judged by the speakers’ language instinct. Then every relative clause has been examined carefully. This article which is descriptive-analytic is done within the typological framework based on the work of Comrie (1989) to answer the questions of “what strategies have been conducted to construct relative clauses and where the relativizer can sit”. According to the findings of this research Turkish relative clauses benefit from gap strategy and this language lacks a relativizer like “ke” in Persian.