Argument Structure of the Persian Perception verb “didæn”: Goldberg's Construction Grammar Approach

Perception verbs as important category of verbs are used to represent perceptual events related to human and other conscious creatures. This article examines the argument structure of the most important perception verb in Persian, i.e. “didæn’ (to see), within the framework of Goldberg's Construction Grammar (1995, 2006). The data includes a collection of 500 Persian sentences extracted from the Hamshahri corpus. The results show that the subject of “didæn’, semantically, plays the role of senser and its object plays the role of phenomenon that sometimes appears as a nominal phrase and sometimes as a subordinate clause. The verb "didæn" has a high degree of polysemy and in this study 17 different meanings have been detected. In each meaning, the argument structure differs in terms of formal or semantic properties of the object and/or the number of complements. Therefore, it can be argued that, in contrast to the projectionist approach, the argument structure of “didæn” is not dependent to the verb itself, but to a particular construction in which the verb occurs. This conclusion is in line with the constructionist approach that posits that a construction by itself has independent form and meaning.