A study on compound verbs in high school Farsi textbooks

One of mostly criticized topics in high school Farsi textbooks is “compound verbs”. This is the most problematic topic according to Farsi literature teachers. In this paper, First, some of the grammarians and linguists΄ views on compound verbs is presented. Then, the scientific and linguistic basis of compound verbs is introduced. And at last, the problems of high school Farsi textbook (2) on this topic would be considered and criticized. The topic of compound verbs in the above mentioned textbook reflects Vahidiyan Kamyar΄s views. On the contrary to many Iranian grammarians and linguists (Khanlari,1365; Sadeghi,1372; Dabirmoghadam,1374), he believes that the number of Farsi compound verbs are very few. To support this claim, he resorts to the syntactic criterion of “non-expandability of the non-morphological part of compound verbs”. There is lots of cases that violates this criterion, due to its haphazard assortment (mishmash) of the grammatical and syntactic principles. In this paper, while criticizing Vahidiyan Kamyar΄s views, the inadequacies of the compound verb topic in high school Farsi textbook (2) was discussed. Then, following Karimi (2005) and Karimi-Doostan (2005), it has been tried to resolve the above mentioned problems. Also, using semantic and syntactic criterions such as clefting and the use of morpheme “ra”, some criterion for identification of compound verbs was introduced.