a study of checking φ- features and subjebt – verb agreement in persian

the main goal of this research is to study, through the minimalist program, the mechanism of checking phi(φ)-features (person & number) and nominative case in persian sentences. different syntactic structures are examined in this paper. it is shown that verb raising is overt in persian and that the uninterpretable φ-features of the finite tense head are valued & checked by the interpretable φ-features of the subject noun/pronoun. the subject noun/pronoun is assigned nominative case by the finite tense head. in other words, checking φ-features and nominative case in persian sentences are in line with the universal checking theory. also, it is shown that accusative case is valued and checked by the transitive head.