Typological markedness of object

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

Typological markedness causes grammatical relations to be encoded overtly in a clause. According to Croft (2003) unmarked objects are those with indefinite inanimate semantic features; conversely, definite animate ones are marked overtly. Indexation and Râ-marking often encode definite and specific objects in Persian. Although rare cases of encoding indefinite objects, seems to be an exception to a general rule in Persian, investigating data reveals that there is no violation of typological tendency. In fact there is a hyponym factor causes overt object marking, namely “identifiability”. In terms of identifiability, not only definite objects but also (non)specific ones can marked overly. Furthermore high frequency of definite object indexation and rare cases of indexing indefinite ones are expected, because all definite objects are identifiable not vice versa.

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References

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