The Role of TP as a Functional Category in the Syntax of Persian; a Minimalist Approach

The Minimalist Program is the most recent approach in generative linguistics. The program mainly seeks to analyze the hierarchical structure of the sentences in human languages with regard to the mental linguistic knowledge of the speakers. An interesting aspect of the structural analysis in this approach is the introduction of functional categories، which help to define the syntactic relationships between lexical categories. Providing a comprehensive description of functional categories، the present study deals with the one of the functional categories i. e. Tense، in the syntax of Persian sentences. In line with the definitions applied in the Minimalist Program، we study verb inflection through agreement and the checking process of uninterpretable features on T and V nodes. Moreover، with regard to the fact that the feature Infl is a strong feature in Persian، the verb is attracted to the head T and placed in a position outside vP، vP deletion and tag questions support this hypothesis.