Non-Projecting Nouns and the Ezafe: Construction in Persian

Abstract

With the advent of functional as well as lexical structure within the noun phrase, there exists much syntactic structure that appears to be unused. While there has been discussion as to which inflectional categories project structure, the question of whether lexical categories project has not been raised. In this paper it is claimed that common nouns in Persian do not project to maximal categories, i.e. do not appear with a complement and a specifier position. Several facts follow as a consequence. First, we explain an intriguing property of the Ezafe construction in Modern Persian, namely that all modifiers of nouns must be heads themselves. We also have an explanation for the presence of the Ezafe vowel itself, which is analyzed as a linker affixed to X0s at PF to identify elements forming a nominal constituent. Finally, we explain why only one possessor is possible within Persian noun phrases. Since nouns cannot project complement and specifier positions, the only position available for a possessor is [SPEC, DP].