Passive Voice in Persian: A Minimalist Approach

In the present study, the subject of “passive voice in Persian language” has been analyzed and studied in a minimalist approach Bowers (2010; 2018). This approach is one of the latest adjustments made in the framework of the minimalist program, in which the shortcomings of the previous theories have been eliminated and the most important achievement is to provide the universal order of merge; An arrangement that, according to Bowers, can be used to organize the merge process in different languages. In this article, with reference to the linguistic data extracted from “the corpus of syntactic dependency of Persian language”, while showing how this universal order of merge works; we will examine a part of the corpus with the label “passive sentences”. Also, by using Bowers’ latest theoretical framework, which is also effective in Persian, we analyze the active constructions that are present in the corpus as a passive sentence. Determining the syntactic position of noun phrases according to their distinct semantic roles, the position of by-phrase in passive sentences, examining the floating quantifier category and differentiating in the way of merging of predicate sentences and passive sentences in Persian are the results of this research in the framework of the minimalist program.