Resolving relative clause attachment ambiguity in Persian sentences

•Persian NSs show a high attachment preference in RCs with a complex NP.•Persian NSs show a high and low attachment preference in RCs with a definite marker.•The Construal Principle may not be limited only to the lexical prepositions.•The Persian enclitic marker –i acts as a theta-assigning morphological unit. Relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when there is a competition between two preceding nouns to act as potential hosts for the upcoming relative clause. To resolve this ambiguity in Persian language, one might rely on such intriguing cues as the enclitic marker -i, semantic congruity or in/animacy that may appear in the clause. This study addressed the role of the first cue i.e. relative clause enclitic marker (EM) -i, which is attached to the second NP, in functioning as a disambiguating cue to hint the relevant antecedent noun. A total number of 20 sentence stimuli were prepared each containing two preceding nouns, one with and one without the marker, followed by an RC, that were given to 49 Persian NSs in offline interpretation tasks to identify their attachment preferences in canonical and EM-supported sentences. The results showed a clear NP1 attachment preference for the canonical but an ambiguous pattern for the EM-supported sentences.