Mazdak Anoushe
Abstract
Whether or not there is a verbal passive construction in Persian has been highly controversial. Traditional grammarians and most linguists have argued that there is a structural ...
Read More
Whether or not there is a verbal passive construction in Persian has been highly controversial. Traditional grammarians and most linguists have argued that there is a structural passive construction in Persian, similar to that observed in English. Within the framework of the Minimalist Program, but more in the spirit of Emonds’s (2006) division of analytic passives into verbal and adjectival, it will be argued that the Persian so-called verbal passive construction is just an instance of adjectival passive, or indeed, unaccusative CPr with a past participle serving as its NV element. In line with what holds for verb movement in simplex and complex predicates, it will be discussed in detail that Modern Persian lacks verbal passive constructions and hence passive projections, and in contrast to the grammatical verb budan ‘to be’ which can be used either as a light verb in complex predicates or as a perfect auxiliary in present/past perfect tenses, the grammatical verb šodan ‘to become’, which is traditionally considered as a passive auxiliary, is indeed a light verb hosted by an NV element. According to this line of analysis, in Persian adjectival passives, the head [A-en] is present in both LF and PF and the past participle is obligatorily interpreted as an adjective.
