Author: Arsalan Kahnemuyipour
Title: The CP-vP Parallelism: Evidence from (some) Iranian Languages
Date: Sunday, April 21, 2019
Location: Tucson, AZ, USA
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss several areas in my work where a parallelism between CP and vP has been drawn, a parallelism which finds a natural place in a multiple spell-out framework which takes CP and vP to be phases. In particular, I will present three cases where a syntactic phenomenon (or projection) which has been typically associated with the CP domain is shown to occur in the vP domain. I will start with a brief illustration of wh-questions in Persian (based on my work in the early 2000’s), where it is shown that wh-phrases appear in a focus position at the edge of vP in Persian (though they may move further to a higher position), in contrast to the more common wh-movement to the edge of CP. I will then provide a brief overview of second position clisis in Eastern Armenian (joint work with Karine Megerdoomian, also found in Iranian languages such as dialects of Kurdish), where second position has to be understood in reference to the vP domain, rather than the more established CP domain. The focus of my talk, however, will be on the syntactic position of negation in Persian. I will argue that negation in Persian is vP-internal syntactically, in contrast to the position in the CP domain found in many other languages, and suggested to be true of Persian as well. I will first argue that the domain of nominalization in Persian is vP using evidence from the distribution of various kinds of syntactic objects in the context of nominalization. Then, by showing that negation can be included in the nominalization domain, I conclude that negation has to be vP-internal. I will place this proposal in the context of other claims about Persian negation in the literature.