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Do psychological constructions in Persian involve complex predicates?
(Rice University, 2009-02-11) Sedighi, Anousha; Linguistics Department
Constructions introduced in this work have been introduced as Impersonal/Subject-less in the Persian literature involving compound verbs. I explore them from the point of view of Psychological constructions and show that they do not involve compound verbs. I capture properties of Persian psychological constructions by proposing that they contain a Tense requirement and involve Applied Arguments. I depart from previous works (Pylkkänen 2000, 2002) which argue that applicative heads can take only a vP or a DP as complement. I propose a new category of Applicative head, Super High Applicative head, which takes a TP (a full proposition) as complement. Constructions studied in this work provide further evidence for the divorce of nominative licensing and verbal agreement proposed by Haeberli (2002), Pesetsky and Torrego (2001, 2004, 2007) and Svenonius (2001), among others.