Abstract

This article studies the structure of double-object constructions, a challenging structure in Persian, based on Bowers’ (1993, 2001) minimalist approach. The major goal here is to evaluate the effectiveness of Bowers’ approach in analyzing such constructions. First, we reviewed the Persian grammarians’ analyses of transitivity and the continuity of the transitive system which claims that there are verbs with one object at one side of this continuum and verbs with two objects at the other side. Based on this analysis, transitivity differs from verb to verb. In other words, di-transitive verbs are more transitive than other verbs because they have to get two objects so that the omission of one of these objects makes the construction ungrammatical. In this study we used Bowers’ approach (1993, 2001), i.e., double predication phrase design, to analyze the above mentioned structures in Persian. Later the sequence of the direct-indirect object was identified to be the unmarked grammatical sequence in Persian based on native speakers’ language intuition.

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