Comparative Linguistic Research

Comparative Linguistic Research

Typology of word order in the spoken and written narrative corpus of Seven-Year-Old Persian-Speaking Children of Tehran

Articles in Press

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors
Elaheh Taheri GhaleNo, 1
Masood Ghayoomi 2
1 Visiting Professor of Linguistics, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz.
2 Associate Professor, Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies.
10.22084/rjhll.2026.32083.2419
Abstract
The principal objective of the present paper is to offer a typological description of Persian syntax employed in the spoken and written narrative corpus of forty monolingual children aged 7-8 (twenty girls and twenty boys) from Tehran (Taheri Ghaleno & Dabirmoghadam, 2019), under Dryer (1992) theoretical framework, with specific reference to the twenty-four correlation pairs. A total of 154 narrative samples were produced. In this study, both quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods were employed.The analysis of 1,690 spoken and 1,055 written sentences from the narrative corpus revealed that, the spoken and written corpus shows a typological tendency toward the verb-medial pattern. this supports the robustness of the “mixed category” typology. child participants employed both pre-verbal and post-verbal forms of prepositional, predicative and adverbial phrases, suggesting that this postposing may be driven by pragmatic and interactional motivations. The hierarchical organization of postposing in the corpus under investigation was also delineated.
Keywords
Word order
language typology
Persian syntax
child language
postposing hierarchy
Subjects