Separability of Light Verb Constructions in Persian*

. ʔa:qa:z-e ka:r-e Ali
start-Ez. work-Ez Ali
‘Ali’s starting the work’
(23) a. Ali Sasan-ra: ra:hnama:ʔi kard.
Ali Sasan-DOM advice do-Past
‘Ali advised Sasan.’
b. ra:hnama:ʔi-ye Ali be Sasan.
advice-Ez. Ali to Sasan
‘Ali’s advice to Sasan’
(24) a. Ali be Sasan komak kard.
Ali to Sasan help do-past
‘Ali helped Sasan.’
b. komak-e Ali be Sasan
help-Ez. Ali to Sasan
‘Ali’s help to Sasan’
As can be seen in the (b) nominal expressions in (21-24), the nominal elements of
LVCs in the (a) examples in (21-24) can head NPs which contain all the arguments of the
corresponding LVCs. Hence, it is justifiable to hold that the PVs in (21-24) are
predicative and responsible for the argument structures of the LVCs. On the contrary, as
indicated in (19b, 20b) nominal forms, the PVs in (19-20) sentences cannot head NPs
containing the arguments predicated in (19-20) sentences by the LVCs. Therefore, the
PVs such as those in (18c) as shown in (19-20) are non-predicative nominal PVs and the
PVs such as those in (18a-b) as shown in (21-24) are predicative PV nouns. Of course, it
is obvious that the predicational difference between the non-predicative PVs (19-20) and
the predicative ones (21-24) is related to the meaning of the PVs. While the former are
semantically opaque nouns referring to semantically referential objects in the universe,
the latter are predicative nouns referring to actions or events.
3.2.2. Morphosyntactic Properties of Nominal PVs
Most Persian lexical words can be categorized into word classes such as nouns,
verbs, prepositions and adjectives/adverbs and these categories can be differentiated from
each other by morphosyntactic and distributional tests. Although Croft (2005: 435) in
line with Schachter (1985: 5-6), Croft (1991: 45-46), Croft (2001: 75-83) and Eavan and
Osada (2005) criticizes the distributional method of lexical word categorization, he states
that the distributional method is the fundamental empirical method and there is no other.
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