Double Object Construction in the Persian Literary Texts

Double object construction in the Persian Literary texts. This article reports an investigation of the double object construction (DOC) in a selective corpus of Persian literary works written from the Arab invasion (in ninth century AD) up to the present time. We also investigate dative alternation, the changes in structure and use of these constructions, and the possible sources of such changes. We propose that the use of the morpheme râ needs to be explained in reference to its roles as figure marker and within the framework of the Figure-Ground theory (Talmy, 1972). Another element of Persian DOC studied here is the morpheme mar which has been in use for more than six centuries. The proposal is that this morpheme has the same role as the figure marker in DOCs without râ, and in such constructions with râ plays a complementary role besides râ.