A Smuggling Approach to the Passive Structure in Persian

This paper presents an investigation of the passive structure in Persian from the standpoint of smuggling approach (Collins 2005). The smuggling approach to passive distinguishes itself from the predecessor generative approaches in its full conformity with Baker’s (1988) Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH). Successful, though, in accounting for the structure of passive in SVO languages, the smuggling approach to passive falls short of accounting for the correct word order in SOV languages such as Persian. To remedy the lacuna, we will adduce evidence from the independent properties of the syntax of Persian to establish that the smuggling approach can give rise to promising results in SOV languages as well, once certain syntactic variables of those languages are taken into account.