Stefan Müller: Persian Complex Predicates and the Limits of Inheritance-Based Analyses

Persian complex predicates pose an interesting challenge for theoretical linguistics, since they have both word-like and phrase-like properties. For instance, they can feed derivational processes, but they are also separable by the future auxiliary or the negation prefix.

Various proposals have been made in the literature to capture the nature of Persian complex predicates, among them analyses that treat them on a purely phrasal basis or purely in the lexicon. Mixed analyses that analyze them as words per default and as phrases in the non-default case were also suggested.

In the talk I show that theories that exclusively rely on classification of patterns in inheritance hierarchies cannot account for the facts in an insightful way unless they are augmented by transformations or similar devices. I then show that a lexical account together with appropriate ID schemata and an argument attraction analysis of the future auxiliary has none of the shortcomings that classification-based analyses have and that it can account for both the phrasal and the word-like properties of Persian complex predicates.

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