A Study of Grammatical Relation Hierarchy in the Contemporary Written Persian Language

Typology is one of the sub-branches of linguistics. ”It is the study of linguistic patterns that are found cross-linguistically, in particular, patterns that can be discovered solely by cross-linguistic comparison” (Croft, 1990, p. 1). The purpose of typology is to determine the dominant tendencies of the languages. Some of these tendencies are reflected in the form of different hierarchies on word order in the languages. In this paper, we will study one of these hierarchies which is called ”grammatical relation hierarchy” and can be shown as follows: subject ＜ direct object ＜ indirect object ＜ oblique in the Persian language. Our purpose was to see if word order of the grammatical relations in the Persian sentences obeys from this hierarchy. Our corpus included 1,000 transitive and intransitive indicative simple independent sentences. Our findings show that there can be seen some disorders in the attested word order of the grammatical constituents in Persian and they do not totally obey this hierarchy but it seems it is mostly the oblique constituent which causes these disorders. Thus, either it should be eliminated from our study on this hierarchy or we have to accept that Persian language, does not follow the grammatical relation hierarchy which is considered as a ”typological universal”.