Small Clauses in Persian

The Persian morpheme ra has attracted the attention of many linguists including Karimi (1989), Dabir-Moghaddam (1990) and Ghomeshi (1996) among others. Karimi takes ra as the accusative case marker, the presence of which on subjects and objects of prepositions render the sentence ungrammatical. According to Ghomeshi (1996), it marks DPs functioning as VP-level topics. Dabir-Moghaddam (1990) analyzes ra as the secondary topic marker in the Halidayian Functional grammar framework. In none of these analyses, this morpheme appear on deep subjects. In this article, it is highlighted that ra may also mark subjects, just in case it occurs in the right grammatical configuration. More specifically Persian has the category of small clause in which an NP marked with ra is the subject of the small clause rathar than object of the matrix sentence. This is an unprecedented hypothesis in Persian linguistic literature. I also present a minimalist account of the construction in question.