A VP Shell Analysis of Persian Verb Phrase Based on the Minimalist Program

Chomsky (1995), following on from Larson (1988, 1990), proposed the VP shell analysis to account for the derivation of verbal constructions with multiple complements. Based on this analysis, a verb phrase structure is composed of (a) an inner VP core headed by a lexical verb (V) and (b) an outer vP shell headed by an abstract light verb (v) with a causative/agentive interpretation. This article is an attempt to analyze the syntactic derivation of some Persian verbal constructions comprised of causative predicates, three-place predicators with phrasal complements as well as the three-place predicators taking a clausal complement. The VP shell analysis of these verb phrases shows that such syntactic constructions, satisfying the Uniform Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH), are the result of syntactic operations such as select(ion), merge(r), head principle and binary principle. Moreover, they can be considered as split projections consisting of the inner VP core and the outer vP shell, and can be derived on the basis of minimalistic principles.