Quantifier Phrases in Modern Persian

Abstract

Searching through the most important linguistic researches about Persian during recent decades, we realized that a syntactic category as quantifier phrase has been overlooked by previous scholars. Following a modern framework proposed by Huddleston and Pullum (2002), the present paper aims to investigate different aspects of Persian quantifier phrases. Besides, discovering and analyzing a new syntactic category as quantifier phrase in Modern Persian, we showed that, unlike a number of previous scholars’ views, Persian noun phrases have the capacity of receiving dependents that precede NP elements such as in ‘this’ and ân ‘that’. We also proved that an adverb can appear in two different positions with different functions. For instance, har do ‘both’ can function as both a determiner and the head of a quantifier phrase the details of which are discussed in the body of the paper.

Keywords

• noun phrase
• quantifier phrase
• determiner
• determinative
• head
• dependent