Perfect Construction in Persian, Within the Framework of Distributed Morphology

Within the non-lexicalist framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), proposed in the early 1990’s by Halle and Marantz, there is no pre-syntactic generative lexicon in which words are derived and all morphosyntactic elements are subject to competition for Vocabulary Item insertion in the head of functional projections. Based on this formal approach to grammar, the present study investigates the perfect construction and past participle ending in Persian, without resorting to their semantic properties. The past participle ending usually called “-en” since the earliest generative work, is one of the most pervasive functional elements in Persian. The study explores the nature of participle inflection and perfect constructions in two successive parts. From an empirical perspective and beyond the purely theoretical assumptions, in the first part arguments drawn from language data are used to show that “De” realized as “de” or “te” at PF, is the underlying form of perfect suffix and it never appears with subjunctive verbs in past tense. Second, past perfect subjunctive clauses are not found in Persian, although “-en” suffix has a widespread distribution in this language. The second part discusses some views on syntactic word formation of present perfect verbs, by focusing on the assumptions being made within the framework of DM. Such a strategy, it is suggested, can be generalized to all cases of perfect constructions with some subtle differences in post-syntactic operations. Meanwhile, it will be argued that perfect suffix is inserted in the head of Particle Phrase licensed by Aspect Phrase.