Open AccessPersian object clitics and the syntax-morphology interface
Author(s) -
Pollet Samvelian,
Jesse Tseng
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2010.12
Subject(s) - clitic , linguistics , computer science , object (grammar) , syntax , verb , scope (computer science) , head driven phrase structure grammar , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , generative grammar , programming language , philosophy
This paper presents a descriptive overview and formal analysis of the use of pronominal clitics forrealizing various types of arguments in Persian, with particular emphasis on object clitics in theverbal domain. We argue that pronominal clitics behave more like suffixes than independent syntacticelements; in cases where they take syntactic scope over an NP or a PP, they must be phrasalaffixes. We propose an HPSG analysis to account for the morphosyntactic aspects of verbalsuffixation of object clitics, possessive clitics, preverbal object clitics, and clitic doublingconstructions. Finally, we explore extensions of the analysis to periphrastic verb forms, and wecompare our proposals for Persian to previous HPSG work on clitic phenomena in other languages.