Verbal Valency- Decreasing Patterns in Persian

Abstract

This article deals with different valency-changing patterns across languages. We refer to the configuration of arguments that a predicate needs to express a proposition as its valence pattern (or argument structure(Grimshaw 1990). Valence is characteristic of all the major word classes. However, it is verbs that demonstrate by far the most diverse and interesting valence patterns as well as most interesting valency-changing operations. Then We will deal exclusively with verbal valence changing patterns in this article. A valency-changing operation either decreases or increases the number of arguments of a verb. We limit our discussion to Valency-decreasing including several specialized operations such as anticausative, passive, resultative, reflexive and reciprocal. Valency-changing operations can be represented morphologically (result of morphological derivational process) or periphrastically (e.g.,by means of auxiliaries). We try to elaborate various valency-decreasing patterns by giving examples from different languages focusing on Persian utilizing such patterns.

Keywords

• valency-decreasing
• antiaccusative
• passivisation
• resultative
• antipassive
• reflexive
• reciprocal