Object ordering in Persian: a corpus-based study

International audienceAlthough a number of hypotheses have been proposed for preverbal object ordering in Persian, none of them have been investigated empirically.In other languages, corpus-based and experimental studies on word order variations, particularly on the relative order of nominal and prepositional objects in the postverbal domain in English, have identified a set of parameters to account for the preferential order: relative length and complexity, givenness, definiteness, pronominality and animacy (Wasow, 2002; Bresnan et al, 2007, among others). In line with these studies, this paper presents the first corpus-based study of word order variation between the nominal and the prepositional object in the preverbal domain in Persian, which is head final in the verbal domain (SOV)