| Serial Verb Constructions in Persian |
| Paper ID : 1069-ICIL (R1) |
| Authors |
|
abedeh mirzaee * 36vakilalbad street,mashhad,iran |
| Abstract |
| Serial verb constructions(SVC) are a grammatical technique whereby two or more verbs form one predicate. A sequence of verbs qualifies as an SVC if there is no marker of syntactic dependency between the components. SVCs are distinct from idiomatic double verb sequences which have restrictions on their mood, tense, and aspect choices. SVCs form one prosodic unit and describe a single event (Aikhenvald & Dixon, 2006:55). In Persian Language, there are different approaches toward the constructions consisting of two verbs. Some linguists suggest them as "double verb constructions" and deny the existence of SVCs in Persian while the others suggest even the Persian progressive tenses are instances of SVCs. In this article I address the SVCs in Persian. First based on the given characteristics of SVCs by Aikhenvald and Dixon (2006), I analyze the Persian data. Among the characteristics, Aspect is the most challenging one. Then I review different types of aspect in Persian and show that at least in four samples, the minor verb doesn't show the aspect. It seems that in this samples the minor verb provides a manner modification to the event as a whole and are instances of what Aikhenvald and Dixon (2006) call as "event-argument serial verbs" and "manner serial verbs". |
| Keywords |
| serial verb constructions, aspect, event-argument serial verb constructions, manner serial verbs |
| Status: Accepted |