An Investigation of Unmarked Placement of Manner Adverbs in Persian

The study investigated the unmarked placement of manner adverbs of Persian as an SOV language by an experiment in which 30 informants were asked to correct the order of sentences in which a manner adverb was used. The study shows that some adverbs significantly appear at the beginning of the sentence before subject, some between subject and object, some between object and verb and some between indirect object and verb in double object constructions. The study also shows that some adverbs occur in two or three places almost equally. Based on results it has been argued that the placement of adverbs depends on semantic and syntactic properties of the structures as well as semantic properties of the adverbs. Considering the fact that speakers had no chance to change the adverbs, the study shows that their decision on adverb placement is not significantly effective. In this study, it has also been argued that VP shell analysis can account for adverb placement if the placement defines both as an adjunct to intermediate projection (X') as well as head (X) in the framework of Minimalist Program.