Reciprocal Alternations in Persian

Abstract

An alternation is defined as a pair of sentences with more or less identical structures and the same meaning. These alternations are sensitive to the meaning component of verbs. Therefore, it can be used as a criterion for classifying verbs in an effective way. Levin classified English verbs into 49 broad semantic classes and 192 subclasses, introducing 79 argument alternations. She believes that various aspects of the syntactic behavior of verbs are tied to their meaning. Moreover, verbs that fall into classes according to shared behavior would be expected to show shared meaning components. The present study aimed to examine a type of alternations introduced by Levin called “Reciprocal Alternation”, which itself includes several types of alternations. One of these alternations, known as “Understood Reciprocal Object Alternation”, is a type of “Transitive Alternations”. Transitive alternations include alternations involving a change in a verb’s transitivity. The other types of Reciprocal Alternation are the alternations that occur without a change in a verb’s transitivity. These alternations include “Simple Reciprocal Alternation”, “Together Reciprocal Alternation”, and “Apart Reciprocal Alternation”. A corpus-based study of 3070 Persian verbs revealed that all these alternations are also found in Persian. Furthermore, two new types of these alternation named “Reciprocal Chaining Alternation” and “Reciprocal Collective Alternation” were introduced in the present study