An investigation into syntactic patterns carrying Persian light verb zadan

A light verb basically constitutes the verbal element of a compound verb. Following Huddleston and Pullum (2002), this paper aims at discovering and analyzing the syntactic patterns in which the Persian verb ‘zadan’ (to hit), which is one the most frequent light verbs in Persian, is the main verb. The research data were collected from the Updating Persian Corpus consisting of 48 million words. The researchers adopted a descriptive-analytical method to conduct this study; a corpus-based survey design was used. The results of the study indicated that zadan is used in five different syntactic patterns. In the first pattern, three phrases comprise the basic elements of the clause, but each of the remaining four patterns needs at least four syntactic elements: (1) nouns, (2) NPs, (3) PPs, and (4) the light verb ‘zadan’. In all of the sentences analyzed, 21 different semantic roles which were played by different syntactic categories were found. The findings of the study also showed that 28% and 72% of the occurrences of this Persian light verb were transitive and intransitive respectively. In 43% of the cases, zadan was used as a stative verb whereas in 57% of the cases, the verb showed a dynamic situation. In over 90% of the occurrences of zadan as a light verb, there was not any equivalent in the form of a single-word verb.