جایگاه گروه اسمی سنگین در زبان فارسی: شواهدی از شم ‌زبانی گویشوران بومی

پژوهش های پیشین در زمینۀ جایگاه گروه اسمی سنگین نشان می دهد که در زبان های »فعل مفعول « همانند انگلیسی، سازه های بلند تر پس از سازه های کوتاه تر (پسایند سازی) ظاهر می شوند؛ ولی در زبان های »مفعول فعل « همانند ژاپنی و کره ای، سازه های بلند قبل از سازه های کوتاه (پیشایند سازی) قرار می گیرند. در این گسترۀ پژوهشی، بررسی زبان فارسی می تواند جالب باشد؛ زیرا این زبان دارای توالی کلمه ای نسبتاً آزاد است و از نظر موقعیت هسته در گروه ها، هم هسته آغاز و هم هسته پایان است. پژوهش هایی که این پدیده را در فارسی بررسی کرده اند شواهدی مبنی بر پیشایند سازی گروه اسمی سنگین در این زبان یافته اند؛ ولی غالب آن ها از داده های پیکره ای و عملکردی استفاده کرده اند که بیشتر نشان دهندۀ استفادۀ زبان در دنیای واقعی است. پژوهش حاضر علاوه بر بررسی داده های عملکردی، با استفاده از آزمون قضاوت دستوری، شم زبانی فارسی زبانان را نیز تحلیل کرده است. نتایج حاصل از یک آزمون تولیدی عملکرد محور و یک آزمون قضاوت دستوری که به 37 فارسی زبان داده شد نشان می دهد با اینکه فارسی زبانان در آزمون قضاوت دستوری هم پیشایند سازی و هم پسایند سازی را قابل قبول می دانند، در آزمون تولیدی غالباً مفعول مستقیم را که دارای نشانگر »را « است بدون توجه به سنگینی آن قبل از مفعول غیرمستقیم قرار می دهند. این یافته ها از دو جنبه اهمیت دارند: 1. استفادۀ هم زمان از داده های تجربی و شم زبانی در پژوهش های زبانی تصویر دقیق تری از پدیدۀ مورد بررسی فراهم می کند، و 2. در زبان فارسی میزان مشخص یا معین بودنِ مفعولِ مستقیم تناوب مفعول ها را تعیین می کند نه سنگینی یا سبکی آن ها.

Heavy NP Shift in Persian: Evidence from Native Speakers’ Intuition

Each language has a certain canonical word order. In English, for example, the SVO canonical word order mandates that the object follow the verb and, with nonalternating dative verbs (Mazurkewich, 1984; Pinker, 1989) like donate, the direct object (DO) precede the indirect object (IO):I donated the books to the library.*I donated to the library the books.However, it has been widely documented that in situations where the DO is longer, this unmarked word order undergoes a change. For example, sentence 4 below is much more acceptable than sentence 3:I donated the books that I had bought several years ago to the library.I donated to the library the books that I had bought several years ago.This phenomenon, known as the ldquo;shortbeforelong rdquo; principle or heavy NP shift (Arnold et al. 2000, Ross, 1967, Stallings et al. 1998, Wasow, 1997), was initially thought to be universal since incremental models of sentence production (e.g., Bock Levelt, 1994; Garrett, 1980), which were in vogue when this phenomenon was initially observed, claimed that short constituents are easier to retrieve and are thus placed before longer and heavier ones. However, investigating other nonGermanic languages, especially through corpus studies, researchers realized that in OV languages like Japanese (Chang, 2009; Yamashita Chang 2001) and Korean (Choi, 2007) the inverse of the shortbeforelong tendency is true, i.e., it is the longer constituent that tends to precede the shorter one in the preverbal domain.The issue of what factors influence the relative order of objects in Persian sentences, and how the length factor can affect this ordering has been tackled only recently in the literature. Faghiri and Samvelian (2014) conducted a corpus analysis of Persian sentences and concluded that the relative order of the DO and the IO in this language corresponds, to a large extent, to the nature of the DO. To corroborate this finding, Faghiri, Samvelian and Hemforth (2014) carried out a webbased sentence completion task and demonstrated that in Persian the relative order of the DO and the IO depends mainly on whether the DO is definite or indefinite and, to a lesser degree, on the DO rsquo;s length, with higher likelihoods of the DOIOV order as the DO gets longer. These two studies, therefore, seem to suggest that in Persian the relative length of the objects is of secondary importance, and conceptual and/or discourse accessibility of the objects determines their order in the preverbal domain (Karimi, 2003).What remains missing in this growing literature on heavy NP shift in Persian, however, is looking into the Persian native speaker rsquo;s intuition or ldquo;knowledge of language rdquo; (Newmeyer, 2003, p. 682) through judgment data. Newmeyer (2003) argues that collecting corpus data, which reflect language usage, is by no means enough to draw definitive conclusions in a linguistic analysis, and native speaker judgments should also be solicited to obtain a better picture of the phenomenon under investigation (see also Manning (2003) who used corpus data to provide counterexamples to data obtained by Pollard and Sag (1994) through judgment tests regarding verb subcategorization in English). In this spirit, the present study seeks to examine heavy NP shift in Persian from a new angle; namely, it intends to examine, primarily through a grammaticality judgment test (GJT), how Persian speakers rate DOIO and IODO sentences, and to what extent the length of the DO affects their ratings. The findings of the GJT are also coupled with a prompted sentence recall task (PSRT), which in turn helps us draw better conclusions about the status of the heavy NP shift phenomenon in Persian.