The Study of Morphological Causatives in Persian

A growing number of recent studies on verbal meaning have demonstrated that positing a direct mapping between (lexical/logical) semantics and syntax with respect to event structure can account for numerous linguistic phenomena. In this article, we demonstrate that certain facts in Persian can only be explained by decomposing verbs into smaller syntactic pieces that reflect subparts of a complex event structure. Contrary to the previous claims, taking the theoretical position that there is only one generative component, we argue that morphological causative predicates are constructed in syntax. By replicating the dobare ‘again’ test, we shall further claim that morphological causatives are not syntactically atomic units, but are decomposable into separate morphemes in the syntactic structure. We show the different pattern in morphological causatives with respect to the modification of manner adverbials in terms of the size of the complement of the vCAUSE.