Date of Award

2-1983

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Anthropology

Supervisor

John Colarusso

Language

English

Abstract

'Raising', a rule of transformational syntax, is considered to be a language universal. This thesis challenges its universality on the basis of evidence from Modern Persian. Whereas in English the subject of the embedded sentence may be raised to object of the matrix verb, in Persian the embedded sentence is restructured, forming a noun phrase, and the S-node is pruned. This renders centre-embedding more manageable and precludes extrapositioning.

Interviews with native speakers and my own knowledge of Persian provide the data for these conclusions.

McMaster University Library


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