چكيده لاتين
The present study investigates the Object complement construction based on the effectiveness of three theories: Small Clause Theory, Predication Theory, and Complex Predicate Theory. Most of the linguists and grammarians who have studied Object complement construction in the Persian language have presented a similar view of the Predication theory. The findings of this study revealed that the analysis of the Object complement construction within the framework of Predication Theory is incompatible with the principles of the Government and Binding theory and Minimalist Program, such as the Theta criterion, Projection principle, and Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH). The analysis of the mentioned construction based on the complex predicate theory on the one hand ignores the principle of linguistic economy and productivity process by increasing the number of compound verbs in Persian, and on the other hand, it ignores the propositional relationship between the Object complement construction and the preceding noun phrase. In the following, based on small clause theory and arguments such as argument alternation, selection restriction, the ambiguity of the interrogative complex sentences, occurrence in different syntactic contexts, idiom chunk, agreement, paraphrasing, sentence fragment, scrambling, gapping pronominalization, and the distribution of NP-types as subjects of small clause construction was shown Object complement together with the preceding noun phrase should be considered a single constituent as a small clause. In the following, we investigated various opinions on the nature of the category of small clauses. Then, based on the exocentric labeling theory of phrase structure (Chomsky 2013, 2015), we attempt to provide a minimalist analysis of their categorial status, internal structure, and case assignment in Persian. Finally, grounded upon the above framework, we showed that since the subject of the small clause will have to move to an upper position to check its case and its remaining copy feature is invisible, the Labeling Algorithm can only see the label of the remaining SO (syntactic object); the small clause’s node is labeled as the phrase that remained in situ. Therefore, the syntactic properties of the predicate in Persian determine the syntactic label of small clauses. Finally, we showed that the copular clauses, Predicative causative clauses, and the construction of perception verbs should also be considered as small clause constructions
