An Investigation into Lexical Aspect of Persian Light Verbs: zadan, dǎdan and xordan Based on Huddleston and Pullum (2002)

Abstract

The verb and its complement have their specific contributions to the meaning of predicate. Sometimes, the verb takes a more modest share than the complement in expressing the predicate; such verbs are referred to as light verbs. However, the degree of the lightness of the verbs is neither systematic nor predictable in verb constructions. We aim to investigate the lexical aspects of the Persian light verbs “zadan” (to hit), “dǎdan” (to give), and “xordan” (to eat) based on Huddleston and Pullum’s Model (2002). There are many verbs that lend themselves to light verb constructions. The data are collected from the Updating Persian Corpus consisting of 48M words. To this end, we extracted all light verbs in the sentences stored on the Updating Persian Corpus using the AntConc software based on Mansouri’s approach (2013). The sampling was done using random sampling method that has scientific validity and is generalizable. In random sampling, every entity of the population enjoys equal chance of inclusion in the sample. Then we analyzed the sentences containing light verbs in terms of the state and activity lexical aspects. The results were plotted in tables and figures with annotations of the verb features. For similar patterns, only one pattern was selected for further analysis. The light verb patterns were listed and analyzed in an inventory one by one. The study adopted a descriptive-analytical method and a corpus-based survey design. Descriptive research has both applied and basic aspects so that it leads to the discovery of facts and bodies of knowledge in an inductive way. An important characteristic of descriptive studies is that the researcher may not manipulate or control the status and role of variables. The researcher merely tends to study and describe what already exists. In this study, we used library research and content analysis methods.