Psychological Evidence for Subject Position in Persian: A Minimalist Syntax

In response to this question whether subject stays in its thematic position within VP or moves to Spec, TP, theoretical debates and given language evidence do not provide sufficient information to determine the derived subject position in Persian sentences’ structure. In this regard, although Persian is a free word order language, the findings of this study show that the displacement of sentence elements in this language is distinguished as a change in the original sentence sequence by Persian speakers, and the change affects their processing time. In addition, considering two different perspectives on the subject's position in Persian and using the psychological evidence, in line with Darzi and Marzban (2014) and Anoshe (2010), we prove that in passive, transitive, and intransitive sentences’ structure in Persian, subject first merges in its thematic position within VP and then moves to Spec, TP.