Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Farideh Haghbin
• Soghra Farkhondeh

Associate professor, Department of Linguistics, Alzahra University

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to study, through the Minimalist Program, the mechanism of checking phi(φ)-features (person & number) and nominative Case in Persian sentences. Different syntactic structures are examined in this paper. It is shown that verb raising is overt in Persian and that the uninterpretable φ-features of the finite tense head are valued & checked by the interpretable φ-features of the subject noun/pronoun. The subject noun/pronoun is assigned nominative Case by the finite tense head. In other words, checking φ-features and nominative Case in Persian sentences are in line with the universal Checking Theory. Also, it is shown that accusative Case is valued and checked by the transitive head.

Keywords

• Checking Theory
• φ-features
• nominative Case
• interpretable features
• uninterpretable features