Language Research

A Non-Lexicalist Analysis of the Imperfective Aspect and Its Interaction with the Perfective Aspect

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Mazdak Anushe

Department, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22059/jolr.2025.373442.666880
Abstract
In the non-lexicalist approach to grammar, all morphemes, whether lexical elements or function heads, are pieces that merge within the domain of syntax to form larger constituents. Consequently, what is referred to as an affix is essentially a morpho-syntactic category that occupies the head of a functional projection and selects another category as its complement (Embick 2015). The present study, adopting such an approach, analyzes the structure of the imperfective aspect in Persian and its morpho-syntactic interaction with the derivation of the perfective aspect. The imperfective aspect, one of the two grammatical aspects in Persian, is embodied in structures traditionally called progressive and continuous verbs. Like the perfective aspect, this verbal construction is used in both present and past tenses, though in contemporary Persian, the imperfective, unlike its perfective counterpart which appears in indicative, subjunctive, and sometimes imperative moods, solely indicates the indicative mood. Throughout this research, we argue that a lexicalist analysis and a feature-based theory, especially where the interaction of the prefix "mi-" with causative and perfective suffixes (“-ɑn” and “de/-te”, respectively) is concerned, fail to account for the certain inflectional forms of the verbs. Framed within non-lexicalist approach and more in the spirit of Distributed Morphology (DM) we explore the construction of the imperfective aspect in Persian and examine the interaction of its prefix with other verbal inflectional elements. In this process, we argue that in the hierarchy of functional projections of sentence in Persian, the perfective projection merges above the imperfective projection. In this structure, the head of PerfP which has an overt auxiliary verb dominates the head of ProgP which hosts a covert grammatical verb in Persian. We will see that this speculation is reinforced by empirical evidence of cliticization of the perfect auxiliary (“bɑš” in Persian and “have” in English) in the present perfect continous sentences.

Keywords

imperfective aspect
perfective aspect
causative projection
auxiliary verb
head-to-head movement
Subjects
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  • Receive Date 02 March 2024
  • Revise Date 12 January 2024
  • Accept Date 11 June 2024

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