نشریه مطالعات زبان و گویش های غرب ایران
سال دهم شماره 38 (پاییز 1401)

Lexical aspect is a semantic feature that concerns how the event described by the verb develops along a timeline. It has two independent features: object-to-event mapping and event feature. The interaction of these two features form a syntactic space within the verb phrase called ‘domain of aspectual interpretation’. The main question of the research is: which syntactic elements affect the formation of domain of aspectual interpretation in Persian eventive predicates. To answer this question, the syntactic derivation of achievement and accomplishment verbs and the formation of their domain of aspectual interpretation have been analyzed according to Mac Donald’s approach (2006, 2008). The results of the study show that if internal argument is quantified noun or bare plural noun, underspecified event feature will co-index with AspP and finally extended domain of aspectual interpretation is formed. But if internal argument is mass noun, it will co-index with vP and minimal domain of aspectual interpretation is formed. The results also indicate that not only the presence or absence of the [quantity] feature is determinative in defining the aspectual domain of interpretation, but also the existence of AspP and the location of internal argument after moving in tree diagram are effective in defining this domain.

Among simple prepositions, we can name ɂaz ‘from’; be ‘to’; daɹ ‘in’; baɹaye ‘for’ and ba ‘with’. The simple prepositions are the most frequent language unit when we search different corpora. This frequency confirms the importance of these language units. Prepositional phrases appear in the sentence either as an argument or as an adjunct. The purpose of this research is to classify the simple verbs with the object of the preposition /be/ in Persian language. This research has used Levin's approach in categorizing English verbs. Levin believes that the similarity of syntactic behavior and syntactic valence of verbs can lead to semantic similarities. In this paper, to investigate this issue, about 200 simple Persian sense verbs that have the object of the preposition /be/ were selected and extracted from the Syntactic Valency Lexicon for Persian Verb (gathered according dependency grammar), and then classified according to Levin's approach. The classification of the data indicated that these verbs could be grouped into seven semantic categories. It is obvious that achieving these semantic classes is useful for language learning and teaching the verbs as the core of the sentence.

This article studies the relationship between grammatical and lexical aspects based on the compositional theory. The data of this study was collected from written and spoken contemporary Persian. The data indicates no one-to-one correspondence between grammatical and lexical aspects. The unbound action events are atelic while the bound ones have telic/ atelic features. The mismatch between grammatical and lexical aspects of state propositions is based on perfect or progressive interpretation of grammatical aspect and atelic feature of lexical aspect. The normal stative happenings have perfect/ progressive grammatical and atelic lexical aspects while the achievement state sentences have telic aspects. There is no one-to-one correspondence between perfect and telic aspects as well as progressive and atelic aspects in accomplishment propositions. The perfect grammatical aspects of accomplishment propositions have telic features. The durative accomplishment events show approaching to the endpoint. The grammatical aspects have an influence on lexical aspects in these events. Perfect grammatical aspects of scalar accomplishment events possess telic/ atelic lexical aspects. The lexical aspect of events is not predictable and it is not determined through inherent features of verbs, but all constituents have an effect on specifying it.

When the negative prefix of na- is added to Kalhori Kurdish verbal constructions with initial glides, the vowel of the prefix is left intact in certain contexts, and yet in others, undergoes partial or full assimilation of Place features with its following glide. The present study investigates the status of the vowel of this prefix through a serial approach to Optimality Theory. The data of the article was collected through interviews with Kalhori Kurdish speakers as well as the previous research in Kalhori and Sorani dialects. After collecting data and analysing them through Harmonic Serialism, it was revealed that the vowel is left unchanged in open syllables, but it assimilates with the following glide in the features of place of articulation when the vowel and the glide form a closed syllable. This assimilation, however, is partial and only allowed if the vowel and the following glide are not both high

The present study deals with hiatus resolution through vowel reduction in Kurdish and Persian based on OT phonology. A collection of movies, TV series, and written texts formed the corpus of the study. In data description and analysis, the linguistic intuition of native Persian and Central Kurdish speakers were used. Based on the analysis, the authors concluded that Persian and Kurdish use glide formation through vowel reduction to resolve hiatus in certain phonetic environments. In Persian, to resolve hiatus, the two high vowels /i/ and /u/ are converted into a short vowel and the glides /j/ and /w/, respectively. In Central Kurdish, glide formation occurs in high vowels /i:, u:/ and mid-high vowels /ē:, ō:/. Glide formation in Persian is accompanied with a quantitative change in vowel /i:/ and a quantitative and qualitative change in /u:/. In contrast, glide formation in Central Kurdish is accompanied with only quantitative change in long vowels. The OT analysis revealed that the main factor driving hiatus resolution in both Persian and Kurdish is the need for an onset in syllable structure. In contexts in which glide formation occurs through vowel reduction, the active constraints in Persian and Kurdish are: ONSET, AGREE(place), MAX, DEP, IDENT(µ).

Two approaches can be identified to how external arguments are introduced to the event structure of verbal predicates. One approach takes the causative/little verb as the functional head introducing the external argument to the structure. Another approach assumes that the external argument is severed from the verb phase and introduced by a voice head to the structure. In this paper, it is argued that the voice head is involved in introducing the external argument to the structure. The evidence corroborating the proposed analysis is adduced from the interaction of morphological causatives and passivization in Azeri, spoken in Serish Abad, Ghorveh. The causative verb in Azeri is derived from the anti-causative counterpart through the addition of a causative morpheme. A closer inspection of data shows that the derived causative verb can appear in the passive construction. The fact that the external argument is suppressed in the passive construction and that the causative verb retains its causative morpheme provides evidence that the causative morpheme (vº) is not responsible for introducing the external argument. The correlation of the passive morphology and the external argument suppression fits squarely within the approach taking voice to be licensing the external argument.