Event Types in the Generative Lexicon Implications for Persian Compound Verbs

Compounding is a highly productive phenomenon in Persian and compound verbs have been the subject of several interesting studies in a variety of frameworks. In this paper, I look at a small subset of these verbs and try to capture some of the constraints and generalities involved in the compounding process. The theoretical framework of the paper is the Generative Lexicon (GL) as formalized in Pustejovsky (1995). In section 1, I provide a brief review of some of the studies on compound verbs in Persian. Section 2 discusses the data that I consider and the theoretical analysis of the data is presented in section 3. The goal of the paper is to approach a well-known problem from a new angle and see whether or not the approach taken, namely the GL approach, looks as a promising framework for the analysis of Persian compounds. As it is argued in the body of the paper, this approach proves very promising enabling the researcher to capture a lot of the intuitionis and generalities observed in the phenomenon although it is acknowledge that a great deal of details remain to be worked out in future research.