Predicative multi-word expressions in Persian

Predicative multi-word expressions in Persian Jens Fleischhauer Department of General Linguistics Heinrich-Heine-Universit¨at, D¨usseldorf, Germany fleischhauer@phil.uni-duesseldorf.de Abstract Persian, like many other Asian languages, li- censes the use of bare nouns in object position. Such sequences are often treated as multi- word expressions (compound verbs/light verb constructions, and pseudo-incorporation con- structions). In the paper, I argue against a uniform treatment of all ‘bare noun + verb’ sequences in contemporary Persian. The pa- per presents criteria which allow to distinguish light verb constructions from other super- ficially similarly looking predicational con- struction types. 1 Introduction: Predicative construction types Persian, an Iranian language of Western Asia, has a rather small set of lexically full verbs. Moham- mad & Karimi (1992, 195) mention a number of around 115 lexically full verbs; others, for exam- ple Samvelian & Faghiri (2016, 212) and Samvelian (2018, 256), mention somewhat higher numbers (about 250) but state that only around half of them are still in use. The lack of full verbs is compensated by the use of light verb constructions (sometimes also called ‘compound verbs’). Light verb construc- tions (LVCs) consist of a semantically reduced verb and a non-verbal element (NVE). The NVE is proto- typically an NP (cf. the LVC sedˆa dˆadan ‘to produce a sound’ in (1)).1 1Glossing of the examples follows the Leipzig glossing rules; the following abbreviations are used: ABS: absolutive, ACC: accusative, CL: classifier, DEM: demonstrative, EMPH: emphatic, ERG: ergative, EZ: ezˆafe, IMPF: imperfective aspect, (1) Sag dog sedˆa sound dˆad. give.PST ‘The dog made a sound.’ Light verb constructions are multi-word expressions since they form a predicational unit consisting of (at least) two words. LVCs are fixed expressions since the set of light verbs is rather restricted (according to Family (2006, 8), around 20 Persian full verbs ex- hibit light and heavy uses). Furthermore, the com- bination of a light verb with a specific type of NVE is not fully predictable. Nevertheless, LVCs are se- mantically compositional as they show properties very similar to those found with idiomatically com- bining expressions (in the sense of Nunberg et al. 1994); LVCs license internal modification and form families (Family, 2011; Samvelian, 2012; Samvelian & Faghiri, 2014, 2016; Fleischhauer et al., 2019; Fleischhauer & Gamerschlag, 2019; Fleischhauer & Neisani, 2020). Light verbs are formally identical to the lexically full verbs as the examples in (2) show. The light use of xordan ‘eat’ is illustrated in (2a), there it heads the LVC qose xordan ‘to worry about’ (lit. ‘concern eat’). The example in (2b) illustrates the heavy use of xordan which denotes an event of eating food. (2) a. hˆamiˇse always qosey-e concern-EZ fˆarda-ra tomorrow-ACC mi-xor-ˆad. IMPF-eat-3SG .‘She always worries about the future.’ (Family, 2006, 85) INDEF: indefinite, NEG: negation, PST: past tense, PL: plural, SG: singular, SUB: subjunctive. b. Bˆaˇcˇce-ha child-PL qazˆa food rˆa ACC xord-and. eat.PST-3PL ‘The children ate the food.’ There is some debate whether all sequences of bare noun plus verb should be conceived as instances of the same type of complex predicate …

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