Re-thinking Compositionality in Persian Complex Predicates

Abstract

Persian Complex Predicates (CPs) have been a focus of interest during the last two decades. Their formation (i.e. morphological/lexical vs. phrasal/syntactic) and their interpretation (compositional vs. idiomatic) have been thoroughly inves-tigated and various analyses have been proposed to account for their seemingly contradictory properties. In this paper, we revisit the issue of the compositionality of Persian CPs, focusing on Noun-Verb combinations, and provide a Construction-based approach which allows to overcome the apparent contradiction between their idiomatic and compositional properties, and offers a new insight into their produc-tivity.