The Copy Theory of Movement and Linearization in the Old and Middle Persian,A Study Based on Generative Grammar

In this paper, the movement of constituents of sentences in the old and middle Persian is studied based on the theoretical foundations of the Minimalist Programme (Chomsky 1995). According to the Copy Theory of Movement, the moved element leaves a copy and moves to the new location in the sentence and the moved element and its copy form a chain. The formed chain has only one element to be pronounced in the PF. The deletion of all elements in the formed chain except the head of chain based on the Chain Reduction Principle proposed by Nunes (1995) prepares the appropriate condition for realization of Linearization Principle. The selection of elements for deletion is done by the Economy Principle. By considering the fact that in the formed chain, the head of the chain has less formal features compared to the other elements (copies), so the deletion of the copies is more economical. The main purpose of doing this diachronic research is to study the feasibility of applying the principles of the Copy Theory of Movement and the Chain Reduction Principle for explaining the movement of the constituents in the Old and Middle Persian sentences. Studying of the word order and the moved constituents and also their pronunciations in the sentences of the Old and Middle Persian by considering the foundation of the Minimalist programme (Chomsky 1995 and Nunes 1995) shows that these notions are capable to explain the movement of constituents. The Persian language has free word order and the constituents can move to other locations in the sentences based on topicalization or focus movement. Having uninterpretable features of [uTpoic] or [uFocus], the moved elements can have their features checked and deleted under sisterhood by moving to the topic or focus phrase in the sentence but the remained copies have their [uTpoic] or [uFocus] features unchecked. According to the Economy Principle in Language derivation and the Chain Reduction Principlesuggested by Nunes (1995), the remained copy of the moved constituent in the sentencethe Old and Middle Persian should be deleted in the PF since it has more features than the moved element. The results of this study show that the explanations provided by the Linear Axiom Principle, Copy Theory of Movement, and the notion of Chain Reduction Principle help us to explain the syntactic phenomenon of movement and linearization and phonetic realization of constituents in the sentences of Old and Middle Persian appropriately.