The study of efficiency of the minimalism and optimality approaches in explaining subject-verb agreements in Persian Language

Abstract

The present research deals with the investigation of subject-intransitive verb agreement in the Persian language. The corpus of this research has been extracted from articles as well as spoken and written utterances. The data are analyzed based on Minimality and Optimality approaches each of which has been explained under generative framework. The research intends to show the exception cases of agreement in the traditional Persian grammar based on Chomsky's recent Minimalist approach which is syntactic-based and the optimal theory which is constraint-based. The reason behind selecting these two approaches is to determine as which one of them explains the exceptional agreements better. In the minimality, subject-verb agreement involves a relationship between probe and goal in order to determine the unvalued features. But in the optimality, the interaction of constraints influences the choice of optimal agreements. The findings demonstrate that all the exception cases of agreements are explained based on the minimal approach; in honorific or polite application, the presence of the feature [+HON] causes plural agreement on verb. In the subject-less verbs, the probe agrees with null PRO. Moreover, in optimality, the optimal choice is determined following the Extended Animacy Hierarchy. The results show that the minimal approach is much more efficient than the optimality theory in explaining the subject-verb agreements. © 2014, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.