Cross-referencing and Agreement in Persian: Two separate strategies

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PhD in Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba'i University. Tehran, Iran

Abstract

This paper claims different status for two rather similar sets of pronominal bound morphemes attach to verbs in Persian: first, subject agreement markers as affixes used to reflect grammatical subject agreement and second, bound person forms which are actually pronominal clitics also attach to verbs in an optional manner with optional conominal indicating cross-referencing. Siewierska (1999) believes that grammatical agreement is limited only to subject agreement thus subject agreement markers could be affixes meanwhile object agreement markers are always clitics. But it is not the case for languages with both subject and object agreement and subject agreement markers in these languages are also clitics. This paper discusses that since subject agreement markers in Persian are affixes indeed, so firstly Persian lacks object agreement and secondly pronominal clitics are cross-referencing elements. Agreement and cross-referencing are two separate strategies in Persian, agreement is a syntactic relation, constrained by Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky, 2001) while cross-referencing is a discoursal, speaker-oriented phenomenon.

Keywords

Language and Linguistics
Volume 18, Issue 35
February 2023
Pages 213-234

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