A Typological Analysis of Coding and Behavioral Properties of Ditransitive Constructions in Persian

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

This paper tries to deal with ditransitive constructions in Persian based on Malchukov et. al.(2007) which focus mainly on a semantic definition of these constructions. They regard a ditransitive construction as consisting of a predicate that takes three arguments: an agent (A), a recipient-like argument (R), and a theme (T). The event coded in this way involves physical or mental transfer. At first, the coding properties of ditransitives such as case-marking, indexation, and word order are explored, aiming at finding the relevant alignment. Next, these constructions are analyzed with respect to the behavioral properties of the two objects regarding  syntactic phenomena like passivization, relativization, incorporation, etc. the results show that in Persian ditransitive constructions both case-marking and indexation follow indirective alignment, although, for these properties alignment alternation does exist. Word order is mainly affected by pragmatic factors. Behavioral properties mainly follow the coding properties, mostly showing indirective alignment.

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