Complex Predicates in PersianAbstractThe correlation between the meaning of verbs and the syntactic structure in which they appear has generated a renewed interest in the interaction between the lexical and syntactic components of the linguistic system. Two main approaches to verb-formation can be distinguished: Lexicalist theories believe in an independent module of word-formation consisting of richly annotated verbal entries; the Predicate-based approaches, on the other hand, argue that verbs are formed in a component that is subject to syntactic principles and believe in a direct relation between syntactic structure and semantic properties. In this talk, I will investigate causative/inchoative alternations and unergative verbs in Persian, and I will argue that a compositional and predicate-based approach to verb-formation can best capture the properties of these complex predicates.A study of the syntactic and semantic properties of a number of light verb constructions in Persian helps isolate the individual contributions of the preverbal element and the light verb. I will show that, as previously discussed in the literature, the substantive aspects of the complex predicate are contributed by the preverbal element while the event information is carried by the light verb part. I argue, however, that the preverbal and verbal elements can further be decomposed into lexical and functional parts, with the latter projecting all arguments of the verbal construction. In particular, I will propose an analysis based on a syntactic decomposition of verbal predicates following ideas developed in Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993), the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) and the approaches in Vergnaud (2000) and Hale and Keyser (1993), whereby the event structure is formed by the combination of the root (represented by the preverbal element) and functional components (instantiated as light verbs). In this analysis, the argument structure is not projected from the lexicon but is formed compositionally by the conjunction of the components of the complex predicate in syntax. The dual behavior of Persian complex predicates as lexical and syntactic elements, which has been attested in Persian literature on light verb constructions, follows naturally from the analysis proposed since there is no strict division between the level of word-formation and the component manipulating phrasal constructs (Marantz 1997). The syntactic decomposition approach to verb-formation captures the compositionality of the verbal constructions and does not give rise to a proliferation of lexical entries. Furthermore, it allows us to derive the various properties of complex predicates in Persian using already existing syntactic principles. References:
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