A syntactic analysis of Persian deverbal nominals: An exo-skeletal approach

Abstract

Nominalized words are complex nominals, which have their own particular derivational structure. These nominals can be derived from different parts of speech. Correspondingly, a deverbal nominal is a nominal that is derived from a verb; although, this is a critical issue in syntactic analysis, few researchers have addressed Persian deverbal nominals with no attention paid to their underlying syntactic structures. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to provide a descriptive syntactic analysis of Persian deverbal nominals based on the Exo-skeletal framework as developed in Borer (2013). Regarding nominalization process, Borer argues that derivational suffixes merge with their roots in the syntax rather than morphology, that is to say, there is a particular syntactic mechanism that underlies the formation of nominals. Also, she divides deverbal nominals into two groups: complex event nominals and result nominals. The results of the present study show that although Persian has suffixal deverbal nominals the syntactic structures of which correspond to Borer's Exo-skeletal framework, this language has prefixal deverbal nominals, too. Moreover, while Borer (2013) proposes that prefixes do not change the lexical category of words they attach to, in the present research a new syntactic structure is provided for the prefixal deverbal nominals in which the categorial prefix is regarded as the head of the derived word. In addition, based on Persian data, there are some nominals which consist of both a categorial prefix and a categorial suffix. Hence the research analysis reveals that the multiple affixation process does not occur simultaneously; instead, it happens sequentially. Finally, the research results indicate that Persian derivational affixes (some of suffixes and all of prefixes) can be polyfunctional in structure, as well.