The Structure of Gilaki Verb Phrase on the Basis of VP Internal Subject Hypothesis

The present paper aims to support the VP-internal subject hypothesis in the Gilaki language within a minimalist perspective. The data of this qualitative research has been collected from different sources including the authors’ linguistic intuition and spoken and written texts. It is worth nothing that the variety of Gilaki selected and explored in this research is spoken in the center and west of the Guilan province. However, the findings can be generalized to all other varieties of Gilaki. We provided pieces of evidence from floating quantifiers, coordinate structure constraint, idiom chunks and raising in order to specify the base-position of the external argument (argument), and showed that the Gilaki data verify the VP-internal subject hypothesis. In fact, We argued that subject is base generated in [Spec,VP], and then move to [Spec,IP] to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle [EPP]. In other words, all arguments of the verbs including subject are base generated within VP, and the surface position of the subject [Spec,IP] hosts a derived subject.