Formation of compound words in Persian

bstract: This article studies compounding in different approaches of Generative Grammar, that is, transformational, lexicalist, and government and binding theories. The evidence includes 8579 synthetic and 3974 root compound nouns of contemporary Persian. Results show that grammatical functions and abstract predicates in transformational theories cannot provide suitable mechanisms to form compounds and they deviate from the recoverable principles. Lexicalist approaches cannot explain the compounds made by external and also two arguments. In a strong version of government and binding approaches regarding compounding, the subcategorization frame of a verb is not regarded, the argument is not immediately adjacent to the derived verb stem and the projection principle is also violated. Moreover, the aspect of a compound is derived from inflectional affix which is governed by the inflectional node. In the moderate model of this approach, the derived verb stem is not able to assign the case to a non- adjacent constituent. Data analysis of root and synthetic compound words in Persian proves that morphology- syntax interactional approach explains formation of compounding more efficiently.