Author
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.
Keywords
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