Topics in Persian VPs

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Lingua 102(1997) 133-167

Topics in Persian VPsa Jila Ghomeshi Department of Linguistics. University of Mussachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA

Received 15 November

1996

Abstract In this paper the Persian morpheme -15 is examined. The examination sheds light on a number of current issues in the theory of case such as whether multiple case marking is an instance of case assigned by a functional head to more than one specifier, and what kinds of semantic properties case can correlate with. The morpheme -rci is of great interest in that (a) it appears to be a case marker, yet can appear more than once in the same clause, and (b) it appears to be a definiteness marker yet can cooccur with indefinite marking. It is argued that -rri case-marks noun phrases that are adjoined to VP. Syntactically such adjunction is free; however, it is claimed that all such noun phrases must be thematically licensed. Thematic licensing occurs either when the noun phrase is construed as the direct object (via theta-role assignment) or when the noun phrase is construed as a topic (via coindexation with a thetamarked element). Semantically, it is argued that -rd marks noun phrases that satisfy a number of different properties all correlating with high transitivity, such as definiteness, animacy or topic-hood. Especially with respect to the latter, the syntactic and semantic functions of -rri converge.

1. Introduction Languages in which the same case marker appears on more than one noun phrase in a single clause are uncommon. Nevertheless they do exist, providing an interesting object of study with implications for the theory of case as a whole. For example, such a study can shed light on questions that have recently arisen, such as whether case is always assigned by a functional head to its specifiers and whether case can be assigned to more than one specifier. Semantic issues also arise when we take a I would like to thank Hagit Borer, Elizabeth Cowper, Hamida Demirdache, Kyle Johnson, Simin Karimi, Diane Massam, Michael Rochemont, Peggy Speas, Elisabeth Villalta, and Ellen Woolford for helpful comments during the writing of this paper, as well as Azar and Farhany Ghomeshi for help with the data. I would also like to thank the audiences at Cornell University, University of Calgary, University of Massachusetts, and the 1996 meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association in St. Catherines where portions of this work were presented. Finally, SSHRC Postdoctoral fellowship #756-95-0364 is gratefully acknowledged. 0024-3841/97/$17.00 0 1997 Elsevier PII SOO24-3841(97)00005-3

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