Right-peripheral subjects in German and Persian across registers

Abstract The right clause edge links the utterance to the larger discourse and supports interlocutors in navigating the communicative situation, making such linguistic alternatives prime candidates to be exploited for register distinction. We investigate whether right-peripheral subjects behave similar with respect to registers in the verb-final languages German and Persian, using the multi-lingual Lang*Reg corpus (Adli, Aria, Elisabeth Verhoeven, Nico Lehmann, Vahid Mortezapour & Jozina Vander Klok. 2023. Lang*Reg: A multi-lingual corpus of intra-speaker variation across situations. Version 0.1.0. Zenodo ), which includes intra-speaker variation for six communicative situations differentiated by interactivity (monologue vs. dialog), social distance (close vs. distant), social hierarchy (equal vs. unequal) and mode (spoken vs. written). We identified four formal types of right-peripheral subjects: extraposition, right dislocation, afterthought + pronoun correlate and afterthought + NP correlate. Our analysis of the functions of these types across languages revealed that Persian extraposition and German right dislocation behave functionally similar whereas German extraposition is highly restricted and no Persian right dislocation could be found. The corpus analysis reveals that Persian and German speakers used the right periphery more often in interactive in contrast to monological communicative events.