Transitivity Alternations In Persian

There are three kinds of changing valency processes in languages: lexical, morphological and syntactic. Transitive and intransitive alternation of verb "poxtan (cook)" is an example of lexical alternation; morphological causative "xordan/ xorandan" (to eat vs. make to eat) is an example of morphological alternation in Persian; and active/passive alternation is an example of syntactic alternation in Persian. This paper deals with all lexical transitivity alternations in Persian based on the model proposed by Beth Levin (1993). These alternations are introduced with the same order and numbers used by Levin in her work (1993). The alternations are as follows: complement of transitive verb = subject of intransitive verb, Unexpressed Object Alternation, Conative Alternation. There are some Persian alternations too which are not used in English. These alternations are introduced at the end of this paper. Beth Levin didnt discuss the alternations dealing with clausal complements. In this paper we didnt mention these alternations too.