Role of Animacy and Concreteness in Relative Clause Ambiguity Resolution in Persian

This study was designed with the aim of examining the experience-based accounts of relative clause ambiguity resolution in Persian by exploring the effect of animacy and concreteness of NPs in a NP complex on the online parsing of an impending relative clause in Persian. To this end, firstly a corpus analysis was done after which it was revealed that instances of high attachment are significantly more prevalent in the Persian corpus. Subsequently, a self -paced reading experiment was conducted with a group of students, in order to examine the online preference of Persian native speakers as modified by the semantic status of the NPs. The analysis of the results from corpus and the online experiment revealed that when animacy and concreteness of the NPs are taken into account their respective effects on relative attachment ambiguity resolution are somewhat similarly reflected in the corpus frequencies and the online attachment biases. This observation has considerable significance with regards to experience-based models concerning the parsing strategies of language users.

Keywords:

animacy , concreteness , corpus analysis , experience-based models , relative clause ambiguity.