Persian object clitics and the syntax-morphology interface

Pollet Samvelian (1) , Jesse Tseng (2)

1 Mondes Iranien et Indien - UMR 7528
2 CLLE-ERSS - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie

This paper presents a descriptive overview and formal analysis of the use of pronominal clitics for realizing various types of arguments in Persian, with particular emphasis on object clitics in the verbal domain. We argue that pronominal clitics behave more like suffixes than independent syntactic elements; in cases where they take syntactic scope over an NP or a PP, they must be phrasal affixes. We propose an HPSG analysis to account for the morphosyntactic aspects of verbal suffixation of object clitics, possessive clitics, preverbal object clitics, and clitic doubling constructions. Finally, we explore extensions of the analysis to periphrastic verb forms, and we com- pare our proposals for Persian to previous HPSG work on clitic phenomena in other languages.

Mots clés: Object Clitics; HPSG; Syntax-Morphology interface; Persian

Domaines: Linguistique

Pollet Samvelian, Jesse Tseng. Persian object clitics and the syntax-morphology interface. 17th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Jul 2010, Paris, France. pp.212-232. ⟨halshs-00673184⟩