Persian object cliticalizations

Persian object clitics and the syntax-morphology interface
Type	Article
Author(s)	Pollet Samvalian, Jesse Tseng
Editor(s)	Stefan Muller
Publication title	Proceedings of the HPSG10 Conference Universit´e Paris Diderot, Paris 7, France
Publisher	CSLI
Publication date	2010
Pages	21
Country	Univ Paris, Univ Toulouse
Annotator	Atena
Corpus Link	Persian object cliticalizations
Language	English
Media type	web article Persian object clitics and the syntax-morphology interface

By Atena

General Information

This article belongs to the TC Category Interlinear Glossed Text from Linguistic Research.

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Key Terms:

Enclitic pronoun
Pronominal clitic
Clitic doubling
Object clitic 
Ezafe vowel

Summary:

Persian language displays a set of enclitic pronoun besides using of independent pronoun. Pronominal clitics behave more like suffixes than independent syntactic elements. Focus of this paper is on use of pronominal clitic to realize the object of verb. In formal language, cliltic object and independent synthetic objects are in complementary distribution. Clitic doubling is frequent in colloquial register like example (4, 5). Object clitic can also attach to a word other than verb, as long as they appear immediately before the verb and at the edge of another complement of the verb. It is showed in (7) that the host is single word preverbal element of complex predicate, or like (10) with PP complement host. Same argument cannot be multiply realized by clitic both before and after the verb so (8) is incorrect. However it is possible to find two clitics in the same sentence as they realize different arguments like (11), Clitic(-at)attached to preverb element realizes as indirect object, and clitic on the verb(-aš)can additionally realized as direct object. Ezafe is an enclitic vowel/-ye/or/-e/attaching to successive projection of head noun, indicating the presence of the following synthetic dependent. Therefore Ezafe appears on all modifiers between the head noun and its unique NP-final complement like (9, 10).

Original Interlinear Glossed Text

(1)(man) Maryam-râ did-am I Maryam-DDO saw-1sg ‘I saw Maryam’	(2)u-râ did-am I 3sg-DDO saw-1sg ‘I saw him/her’
(3)did-am-aš I saw-1sg-3sg ‘I saw her/him/it’	(4)Maryam-râ did-am-aš Maryam-DDO saw-1sg-3sg ‘I saw Maryam’
(5)u-râ did-am-aš 3sg-DDO saw-1sg-3sg ‘I saw him/her’	(6)bâz kard-am-aš open did-1sg-3sg ‘I opened it’
(7)bâz-aš kard-am open-3sg did-1sg ‘I opened it’	(8)*bâz-aš kard-am-aš open-3sg did-1sg-3sg ‘I opened it’
(9)ru-ye miz gozâšt-am-aš on-EZ table put-1sg-3sg ‘I put it on the table’	(10)ru-ye miz-aš gozâšt-am on-EZ table-3sg put-1sg ‘I put it on the table’
(11)nešhan-at dadam-aš show-2sg gave-1sg-3sg ‘I showed it to you’

Related articles= The position of clitics in Persian intonational structure