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« Kimper in McCarthy-Pater Grant Group | Main | Phonology Group»

Syntax Reading Group

Syntax Reading Group met on Tuesday, October 7. Annahita Farudi presented her joint work with Maziar Toosarvandani on complex predicates and ergativity in Zoroastrian Dari. Here's an abstract.

Ergativity and the structure of complex predicates in Dari

Annahita Farudi (UMass Amherst) and Maziar Toosarvandani (UC Berkeley)

Much of the debate on the structure of complex predicates in Iranian has focussed on the syntactic status of nominal nonverbal elements (NVEs). Some authors have treated nominal NVEs as nonspecific direct object DPs (Mohammad and Karimi 1992, Ghomeshi and Massam 2001, Farudi 2005), while others have argued that the two should be kept structurally distinct (Megerdoomian 2002, Folli et al. 2005). Here, we explore the interaction between ergativity and complex predicates in Dari (Northwest Iranian, Central Plateau: Yazd, Iran) and its consequences for this debate. Assuming the core of Bittner & Hale's (1996) theory of ergativity, we argue that each of these approaches is correct, but only for a subset of complex predicates.