Synthesis Exercise 1
LINC11 Winter 2025
January 22, 2025
Individual Submission due: Wednesday January 29, 23:59 on Quercus
Group Submission due: Monday February 17, 23:59 on Quercus
The following exercises must be completed by uploading a PDF document onto Quercus.
Below you will find a set of data, some background information, and a set of discussion questions about this data and the topic. Considering the data, answer the questions posed to you in prose format, using diagrams and structure drawing where necessary for you discussion, or where explicitly asked by the questions.
You first attempt at this problem is to be completed individually. The problems in the exercise should be chal- lenging, but possible to work out. For your individual attempt, please use only the data provided below. Your answers will be marked for effort and completion. Your second attempt will be completed in a small group with others. The second attempt should be a more in-depth discussion, taking into account the solutions that each in- dividual group member supplied. This group submission will be marked for depth of discussion and accuracy of the solutions and discussion provided.
1 Persian Ditransitives
Persian is what’s known as a Differential Object Marking (DOM) language. This means that instead of a universally-appearing accusative case on direct objects (for example), objects are marked when they need to be differentiated from other material in the clause. The marker in Persian is the morpheme -rā,1 which appears after the noun phrase, e.g. ketāb ‘book’ becomes ketāb-rā . The cause and conditions under which this marking occurs are rela- tively complex; we won’t be solving that problem. In this exercise, we will begin by examining object marking in Ditransitives, with the intention of seeing what it can tell us about the vP in the language.
The first important observation is that, like many other languages, there are two word orders for ditransitives. Persian is an SOV language, so we either see IO-DO-V or DO-IO-V orders:
(1) a. Maryam barāye mā she’r mi-xun-e
Maryam for 1pl poem ipfv-read-3sg
‘Maryam will read poetry to us.’
b. Maryam she’r-rā barāye mā mi-xun-e
Maryam poem-ra for 1pl ipfv-read-3sg
‘Maryam will read a poem to us.’
c. ‘Ali be Sahar gol dād
‘Ali to Sahar flower give.pst.3sg
‘Ali gave flowers to Sahar.’
d. ‘Ali gol-rā be Sahar
‘Ali flower-ra to Sahar dād give.pst.3sg
‘Ali gave a flower to Sahar.’
Pay close attention to the distribution of -rā in these contexts. What do you observe?
Now, formulate an hypothesis for the structure of the Persian ditransitive construction. To help with this, consider one more set of data:
(2) a. har sag-i-rā be sāheb-aš dād-am
every dog-indef-ra to owner-3sg.poss give.pst-1sg
‘I gave every dog to its owner.’
b. be sāheb-aš har sag-i-rā dād-am
to owner-3sg.poss every dog-indef-ra give.pst-1sg
‘I gave every dog to its owner.’
c. *be sāheb-aš har sag dād-am
to owner-3sg.poss every dog give.pst-1sg
Draw your hypothesized structure for Persian ditransitive predicates. You should illustrate your hypothesis with at least two tree structures illustrating the sentences above. Now, discuss how you drew the conclusions that you came to. Is this structure different than the ones proposed for English by Larson and Jackendoff? In what ways? Use structural illustrations and examples from Larson and/or Jackendoff in your comparison between Persian and English.