General Extenders in Persian Discourse: Frequency and Grammatical Distribution

This study tries to investigate the frequency and grammatical distribution of general extenders in Persian. The analysis is based on a corpus of informal conversations. On some occasions, a comparison will also be made with the corpus of informal English compiled and analyzed by Overstreet (1999, 2005). The results of this study lay bare the fact that Persian speakers use adjunctive general extenders more frequently than disjunctive ones. It will also be demonstrated that Persian speakers use general extenders both at clause final and clause-internal positions. Finally, Persian general extenders will be examined with reference to their grammatical agreement requirements.Keywords: Discourse marker; frequency; general extender; grammatical distribution; Persian