Chapter 4 - Compound Verbs in Persian

Summary

The present study investigated the processing of compound verbs in Persian. The aim of the study was to examine whether Persian compound verbs are processed as a whole or as their constituents, and whether semantic transparency and orthographic relationship have any impact on processing compound verbs in Persian. As discussed in the previous chapter, constituent priming effects observed in semantically transparent, semantically opaque and orthographically overlapping prime-target pairs reveal that noun-verb compound verbs in Persian are processed orthographically, which is in turn affected by semantic transparency and parallel input effect.

In this chapter, I will review relevant studies on semantic and syntactic aspects of Persian noun-verb compound verbs. I will introduce different prevailing theories, followed by a critique on each, and then relate it to the findings of the present study. I will continue with a discussion of the existing theories for the constituents of Persian compound verbs, such as noun incorporation. Therefore, this chapter is organized as follows. First, the two compound verb formation processes in Persian; that is, incorporation and combination, will be discussed and compared. Then in Section 4.1, the syntactic/semantic account of Persian compound verbs will be discussed. Some scholars have identified Persian compound verbs as syntactic phrases (e.g., Folli et al., 2005; among others), while other scholars have considered Persian compound verbs to be lexical and represented in the lexicon as compound verbs (e.g., Goldberg, 2007; among others).

The syntactic approach to Persian compound verb formation (e.g. Folli et al., 2005; among others) entails that the syntactic category of a lexical element is determined only by the syntactic context in which it appears. In other words, the syntactic properties of the verb determine the position and interpretation of each argument in the verb phrase.

The lexical approach to Persian compound verb formation (e.g. Goldberg, 2007; among others), on the other hand, entails that the syntactic category of a word is lexically specified. There are two versions of the lexical approach to Persian compound verb formation: (1) the strong version, which holds that the mental lexicon encompasses words, roots, affixes, word-formation rules, and subcategorization frames (information about the arguments); and (2) the weak version, which holds that mental lexicon includes only the atomic roots (such as sound-meaning pairings).