Adjective Predicates in Persian language

There are two main approaches to the predicative function of the adjectives that precede the verb ‘to be’ and it`s equivalences; one which considers these adjectives as a non-verbal element of the compound verb and the other one assumes them as the subject complement. Studying the behavior of the adjectives in the Persian Proposition Bank and Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank show that the adjectives that accompany the verbs ‘to be’ and it`s equivalences are generally divided into two categories: 1- Adjectives that take argument structure and can be called adjective predicates; 2. Adjectives that do not take argument structure. This study assumes that only the second group of adjectives is the subject complement. To prove this claim, two substitution and coordination tests were used to identify whether this adjective is an autonomous constituent or a part of a whole. Also, considering the semantic role of the subject in the sentences containing this group of adjectives and based on the list of compound verbs in the Persian language, the hypothesis of this study was tested. Accordingly, about half of the approximately eleven thousand subject complements reported in the Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank should be viewed as the non-verbal element of the-compound-verb.