Object Incorporation and Aktionsart in Persian

This paper explores the interaction between object incorporation and Aktionsart in Persian. First، about 100 transitive verbs of different classes including states، activities، accomplishments، and achievements are gathered from various spoken and written texts. Afterwards، their potentiality to incorporation are examined using criteria such as semantic، substitution، infinitive formation، intuition، topicalization، scrambling، adverb insertion، etc.. The findings show that object incorporation is related to Aktionsart. This process does not occur in states and accomplishments. Few achievement verbs may incorporate their objects. However، almost all activity verbs may incorporate their second arguments if they are non-referential. This high potentiality to incorporation in activities can be explained by the principle of iconicity. Since activities affect their objects more than other classes the linguistic distance between the verb and the object tend to reduce and make a compound verb as a single unit.