Co-occurrence of Noun-Preverbs and the Light Verb dadæn (‘TO GIVE’) in Persian Compound Verbs based on Generative Lexicon Approach

This paper aims to analyze co-occurrence of noun-preverbs and light verb dadæn (‘TO GIVE’) in Persian compound verbs based on the theory of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky, 1995) and tries to show how the semantic properties influencing co-occurrence of two elements constituting the compound verbs made with this light verb. The first step is to classify noun-preverbs combined with this light verb, using theoretical concepts of Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995). This classification has been done in order to determine the extent to which the selected light verbs co-occur with each of classes and sub-classes of preverbs, thereby determining the semantic type selected by light verbs. The next step, is to examine the semantic contribution of light verbs. Exploiting the information encoded in multiple levels of the lexical-semantic representations of preverbs and light verb dadæn (in particular qualia structure), which consists of limited but necessary information to explain the lexical semantic relations and co-occurrence constraints, allows us to explain the co-occurrence of two elements of compound verbs, based on the concepts of the theory.