Language Research

Abstract Topicalization and focus movement have been discussed in literature with respect to a vriety of their properties. In Persian, syntactic objects within Tense Phrase, including phrasal arguments, may freely be displaced to a higher position and the reordering of these elements is mainly considered to be the result of discourse functional elements such as topic and focus. The present study is an effort to address the question of the formal motiviation of these movements, and their formalization within a feature-based system. Moreover, it tries to account for the surface position of subject in Persian, based on a VP shell analysis and the strength of Dfeature in this language. Thus one of the main contributions of this study is that the uninterpretable D-feature on the head of TP is strong in Persian and as a result, the structural subject has to move to the specifer position of its own clause.