Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

The Persian language has been known to contain an obligatory rule of subject-verb agreement, or “motabeghe-ye fe?l væ fa?el”. However, there are constructions in Persian in which the verb does not agree with the subject. This book investigates two major constructions that appear to induce such a constraint on the verbal agreement pattern in the Persian language.

The first construction contains an inanimate plural subject while the verb appears with the third person singular morphology. Adopting the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) that has recently been used as a key to capturing several agreement restrictions in other languages, I propose that the restriction caused by animacy in Persian resides in post-syntactic morphology through an “Impoverishment” operation.

The second construction I study contains experiencers and psychological predicates. The nominative experiencer does not induce agreement on the verb and the verb appears in the third person singular form. Adopting the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995-2004), I argue that the lack of verbal agreement in Persian psychological constructions is only apparent. Previous studies have proposed that the psychological constructions under review involve compound verbs. However, I provide evidence to show that they do not involve compound verbs. I propose that these constructions have a Tense requirement and involve applied arguments. Furthermore, I propose a new category of strong phase that must be added to the set of strong phases proposed by Chomsky 1999-2004.

The Notion of Subject

The notion of subject has been extensively explored in the past decades. What is a subject? Do we need a subject in every sentence of every language? Does the notion of subject have fixed syntactic and semantic properties and attributes? How many subjects can a sentence have? Although the notion of subject seems rather straightforward at first glance, linguists from different theoretical frameworks have controversial debates around the notion of “Subjecthood.” This work is an attempt to explore the idea found in linguistic literature that there are no postulated standard criteria for subject and subjecthood, and it is not possible to provide a specific definition or description for subjecthood (Sigurðsson 1992-2004, Landau 2003, Harley 1995, and the references therein).