The Study of Possessor Raising in Persian

In the domain of the Ezafe construction in Persian, sometimes, there is found a DP known as the possessor. This article aims at establishing the process of possessor raising in Persian within the Minimalist program (Chomsky 1995). To do this, it is argued that in the domain of the Ezafe construction in Persian, a syntactic constituent may be merged in the spec of the nP where it receives its possessor theta role. This constituent, then, raises to the spec of the dominating DP to get its [+definite] feature checked along the lines of Ritter (1991, 1992). This is a novel proposal for Persian and is important in that it takes the possessor DP as bearing a theta role and leads to the classification of Persian as a language with definite like possessive construction.