The Status of the Nominal in Persian Complex Predicates

Abstract

The nature of the preverbal nominals and their relation to the verb have been the focus of much debate in the Indo-Iranian literature. For Persian, certain analyses have argued that the bare nominals in Complex Predicate constructions are distinct from bare objects, while others have treated the two types of bare nominals uniformly. This paper argues that the two categories of preverbal nouns cannot receive the same analysis since they display distinct syntactic and semantic behavior: The preverbal nominals, unlike the bare object nouns, are unable to receive objective case, cannot be questioned, are modified differently, have different interpretations, give rise to distinct case-assignment contexts and can co-occur with a nonspecific object.

In the analysis proposed here for Persian, which may also be extended to other members of the Indo-Iranian language family, non-specific bare nouns are treated as internal arguments satisfying the selectional restrictions of the thematic verb. Preverbal nominals, on the other hand, are treated as part of the verbal domain and combine with the light verb to form a single predicate. We argue therefore that the specific and non-specific direct objects should be treated as internal arguments while the preverbal nominal is considered as part of the complex verbal predicate. The picture that emerges is a three-way distinction between the arguments and parts of predicates in the verbal constructions.