Holistic Reading in Persian Locative Alternation

The aim of this article is to study the holistic effect in locative alternation of Persian. In Persian a number of verbs denoting dislocation of a substance (locatum) to a surface or a container (location) participate in locative alternation(bar zadan‘load’, pashidan ‘spatter’) The locative alternation in Persian is characterized as a special relationship between two syntactic realizations of the same verb, which are called the locative variant and the objective variant. In locative variant the locatum is realized as NP accompanied by “ra” and location as a prepositional phrase (PrepP). In objective variant the location argument appears as NP accompanied by “ra” and locatum as a bare NP just before the verb. It is shown that contrary to Roshan(1998) and Lazard(1982), realization of location as NP accompanied by “ra” is not necessarily associated with holistic reading. When location argument appears with “ra”, it is considered to be “more affected” than PrepP. Contrary to Anderson (1988) who claims that the partitive/holistic effect is associated with the alternate realization as NP or PrepP, we propose that the choice between coding the location argument as a NP or a PrepP amounts to a choice between coding it as the patient or not. The patient stands in a privileged relation to the process, and it is encoded as “primary affected” entity (NP). The entity realized as a PrepP is encoded only as a secondary affected – hence the location is less ‘affected’ (Langacker 1991). So holicity is seen as an instantiation of the ‘primary affectedness’ semantically associated with the patient in general and “ra” marks the argument which is coded as patient. Count locatums obligatorily appear with “ra” and are associated with holistic and partitve reading. Mass and generic locatums can appear with or without “ra”. When appeared without “ra” holistic reading is not possible since they are not bound in their instantiation domain. When appeared with “ra”, the “quantificational” function of “ra” bounds them in their instantiation domain- hence the possibility of holistic reading.