Transitivity and object marking in Persian

Recently, transitivity has been viewed in light of the principles of functional typology and has been regarded as a prototypical phenomenon rather than a black and white category. It is agreed that in its realization, different syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects play a role. Drawing on the prototypical approach, this paper aims at giving an explanatory account of the linguistic expression of transitivity in Persian. It investigates those properties of transitive prototype which are structurally relevant in Persian as well as their importance in the structural coding of transitivity in Persian clauses. To do this, sentences from every day conversation as well as films are extracted and investigated based on their structural coding and the parameters that are important in this coding. The results show that prototypical transitivity is mainly marked on direct object in this language and that object individuation, object affectedness as well as aspect are the most crucial factors, correlating with each other and affecting the morphosyntactic coding of transitive clauses, among which only object individuation has been the focus of Iranian linguists. It is concluded that among other parameters introduced in the literature (cf., Hopper & Thompson, 1980) and other prototypically based approaches to transitivity, volitionality does not play a significant role in this regard. Despite the previous works done on the distribution of ‘râ’ and the lack of agreement regarding this morpheme, this article indicates that its main function is to mark highly individuated and affected object in high transitive sentences, a conclusion that resounds claims made by Salmani Nodoushan and Mohiyedin Ghomshei (2014).