Experimental methods in cognitive linguistics

Persian extraposition is a process in which a part of a constituent moves to postverbal position. Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is presented by Hengveld and Mackenzei (2008). The goal of this research is processing explanation of Persian postverbal relative clause. Findings show that constituent weight is used in FDG for reasoning the existence of postverbal relative clause. FDG uses the motivated competition for the simultaneous usage of both preverbal and postverbal Persian relative clause. The competition between two processing principles are: Mimnimize Domain Domain Integrity. Whenever Domain Integrity principle wins the competition, relative clause as a pragmatic and semantic part of their head are mapped next to their nominal head in the morphosyntactic template. In contrary, whenever Mimnimize Domain principle wins, relative clause and preposition phrase are mapped at the end of the clause for the sake of their weight.