Secondary Predicates in Persian, A Minimalist Approach

Secondary predicates are among the syntactic structures that have been neglected by the traditional Persian grammarians, but in the course of the last four decades of studies in generative grammar, almost all kinds of this structure have been explored. Secondary predicates are of two major kinds: the so-called depictive predicates and resultatives. A depictive predicate attributes a property to its subject which holds of that subject all the time that the event denoted by the matrix verb is going on. Resultatives attribute a property to their subject which holds of that subject at the point that the event denoted by the matrix verb ends or culminates. In the present study, following Rothstein (2006), I show that the Persian depictive and resultative predicates can be distinguished from each other just by semantic properties; they have no syntactic differences. Moreover, I will discuss that depictives can be subject- or object-oriented, while resultatives can only be object-oriented. Both subject- and object-oriented secondary predicates are adjunct small clause, the former adjoins to the vP and the latter to the VP (or more correctly, to the main PredP) and the argument modified by the second predicate, sideward moves from the adjunct clause to the main clause leaving a PRO in its base position.