A Minimalist Approach Toward the Adjunct Construction in Persian: The Position of Negative Affixes

Abstract

The current paper examines adjunct construction in Persian, which is an Indo-Iranian language. Various researchers have studied adjuncts and adjunction among different languages. Although Adjuncts and adjunction are very important in Persian language, none of the researchers have examined them based on the Minimalist Program and Functional Grammar. Therefore, the present study sought to review the records of Persian and non-Persian linguistic research studies and to introduce adverbs and prepositional phrases in Persian language. Then, their syntactic position was determined based on Radford (2004). The results showed that in Persian sentences, the structural differences could be made to follow from the semantic one. It was found that the view of adverbial licensing made the overall grammar more restrictive by banning reference to different syntactic structures for different semantic classes of adjuncts.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n51p25