Middle Voice in Persian: A Minimalist Approach

The purpose of this study is to investigate the syntactic merging process of the middle constructions in Persian within the minimalist framework proposed by Bowers (2010, 2018). Within this framework, Bowers analyzed the merging of active, middle and passive sentences based on the two categories of 'Predication' and 'Transitivity'. It is worth mentioning that in his latest works, Bowers (2010, 2018) has replaced the transitive phrase (TrP) by 'voice' with its core features intact. The voice category used in Bowers (2010) is a generalization of the transitivity category previously proposed by Bowers (2002). In general, this category enters into a "matching relationship" with objects. Bowers (2018) in his approach calls this node a role of "transitive voice" which is represented as (Vtr). In fact, Bowers goes back from a more general interpretation of this node to a more detailed one. These changes are merely in the name of syntactic nodes and have no effect on the syntactic properties of transitive nodes, because it is evident that Bowers still knows transitive active constructions, middles and passives, including the transitivity category, and unergative and unaccusative constructions without this category