Topics in Persian VPs

In this paper the Persian morpheme -râ 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 -râ 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 -râ 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 -râ 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 -râ converge.

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