Abstract

This study compares verbs and verb collocation patterns in English and Persian in terms of their internal size. English is a language of conciseness, while Persian uses too many words to express a single concept. Due to the diversity of English verb types governed by certain syntactic restriction rules, and thanks to different types of verb collocations, it is potentially hard for the Iranian EFL learners to establish compatibility between Persian and English verbs. The study, using the Hamshahri Newspaper corpus shows that some English verbs have subject or object arguments and even adverbs included within their semantic and syntactic properties and this makes it very easy for the native speakers to express the most with the least number of words This, however, can make finding equivalents very hard especially when Persian follows an SOV sentence pattern in which the two parts of collocation may stay far from each other.

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