Secondary Predicative Structures in Persian

Although the research on small clauses ages over 30, the syntactic nature of small clauses is still a challenging and controversial issue among linguists. In this paper, we start with a brief discussion of the background of the works and approaches related to the nodes governing small clauses. We continue with some arguments in rejecting or accepting some of these approaches. Finally, we describe the construction of secondary Predicative Structures (small clauses) in Persian based on Bower's Minimal Approach (1993, 2001). Based on this approach, these structures consist of [NP XP] and are Tense-less, and their XP is non-verbal. This study assumes a binary-branching structure for small clauses. According to the authors' analyses, in all languages,​​ small clauses which include the subject and the predicate are the functional projections of the predicate, and their difference is only in the concept of the predicate head and its characteristics.