Semantics of Noun-determination in Persian

This paper deals with several issues in the semantics of Persian noun-determination, which has long been of interest to linguists of various theoretical backgrounds, but has only recently started receiving attention from formally-oriented semanticists. The aim of this paper is to introduce and elaborate on several of the more promising newer approaches to the problem of Persian noundetermination, and also to make a new contribution to the treatment of the pospositive case marker râ. Since the subject matter is enormous in scope, I will not make it my objective to make a full description of the Persian noun-determination system; rather, I will try to summarize the existing approaches to several important problems and to formulate a more or less coherent picture of how most of the Persian system could be treated from a formal semantic standpoint. It should specifically be noted that I will not touch upon issues related to discourse or pragmatic factors, which, as prior research shows, also have an important impact on how the Persian noun determination markers, especially –râ, are used.