The Syntactic Analysis of the Structure of Compound Verbs in Persian based on The Theory of Distributed Morphology

زبانشناسی و گویش های خراسان

Article 16, Volume 14, Issue 2, July 2022, Pages 181-201   

Document Type: Original Article

DOI: 10.22067/jlkd.2022.72364.1054

Authors

Ahoo Alvand¹; Zeinab Mohammad Ebrahimi Jahromi^{* 2}

¹PhD student in Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

²Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, School of Literature and Humanities, Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Compound verbs are one of the most frequent types of verbs in Persian and have been the subject of many researches. This type of verb is actually a compound predicate that consists of a verbal component and one (or more) non-verbal component that, together, express a meaning. In this article, we provide a model for the structure of compound verbs in Persian based on the theory of Distributed Morphology. It becomes clear that in the structure of compound verbs, an abstract root is considered for each component. These roots have no syntactic category and phonetic essence and are only a chain of semantic features. At first, roots merge in their base position according to Minimalism Program and pass the known syntactic processes in the theory. After that, they undergo post-syntactic processes on the basis of Distributed Morphology. Finally, the syntactic nodes are prepared for the insertion of Vocabulary Items (VI). It is shown that the root related to the non-verbal component is merged in the head of the predicate group (PredP) and bears the main burden of predication in the sentence. This group is in sister position to the vP. The verbal component of the compound verb is merged into the head of vP.

Keywords

Distributed Morphology; compound verbs; abstract root; fusion; late insertion

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