Semantic roles of dative case in Russian and ways of expressing them in Persian

Grammatical case in the agglutinative and inflected languages is described as a tool that has two functions: 1. determining the syntactic roles of a structure in a sentence, such as subject, direct object, indirect object, and so on. 2. defining the semantic roles of a structure in a sentence such as agent, patient, beneficiary, recipient, etc. In Russian, the grammatical case is also considered as a way to show the syntactic relationship between the elements of a sentence or syntactic group. At the level of the sentence and the syntactic group, the verb or other word that act as head of the group government on its obligatory and optional arguments or complements with the help of grammatical cases. Russian language defines six grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, prepositional. The dative case has a particular importance among the six grammatical cases because it has its own meaning. In Russian, with the help of dative case, five semantic roles are expressed: recipient, addressee, experiencer, beneficiary/malefactive and second member of the relationship. Since Persian does not have the category of »case«, it uses other syntactic tools to express the concepts that are expressed in Russian by the grammatical cases: simple and compound prepositions, postposition «را», ezafe, word order and conjunctions. In Russian, the dative case has four main semantic roles: recipient, addressee, experiencer, beneficiary/malefactive, and a secondary semantic role, i.e., the second member of the relationship. Since Persian language does not have a category »case«, the structures of Russian language that are used in the dative case are expressed in Persian language in different ways. In the present article, we examined each of these roles and identified the methods of expressing them in Persian.