The linguistic study of macro role and participant role assignment in causative constructions of Persian: A Role and Reference Grammar Analysis

In this article we aim to study the causative construction in Persian within Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (VanValin, 2007); the main objective of this article is to study the relation between macro role and participant role assignment in this functional approach of grammar. The data have been collected accidentally from 50 causative sentences of Persian from various types of lexical, syntactic and semantic ones. The findings show that the macro role and participant role assignment process is meaningfully different in causative and non-causative constructions of Persian. In non-causative constructions, “Actor” is the doer of the action and “Undergoer” is a person/thing which undergoes an action; however in causative constructions the “Undergoer” is the doer of the actions. It worth mentioning that the “Animacy” features plays a crucial role in participant role assignment in causative constructions especially in those constructions in which the action is done by an animate undergoer [+ animate]. Consequently it is questionable to accept the classic definition of “patient” thematic role for this type of undergoers and our suggestion is to suppose “cause” thematic role for the actor and the “agent” role for the doer of the action.