Most studies of code switching have focussed on its use in informal, oral settings, but written examples also occur. The Castilian-Hebrew switching in the Jewish taqqanot ‘statutes’ of Valladolid, Spain, written in 1432, provides important data for testing the different constraints proposed in studies on code switching. Examples of switches between determiner-noun, preposition-noun, possessive-noun, quantifier-noun, and ser-participle indicate that the code switches in the taqqanot usually conform to some of the constraints already proposed: the Free Morpheme Constraint, the Equivalence Constraint, and the Closed-Class Constraint. At the same time, the analysis of these medieval switches confronts the same unresolved issues as other studies, for instance, the need to adequately distinguish between borrowings and code switches and the question of whether bilingual utterances always have an identifiable matrix language.

Prior research has suggested that Korean might constitute an exception to the proposed notion of the universality of the rhyme. Five experiments were performed to test this hypothesis out with native speakers of that language. Four different experimental tasks were employed: a global sound similarity judgement task, a concept formation task, a unit reduplication task, and a list recall task. In all cases the results indicate that Korean syllables were seen to contain a cohesive CV or body unit, in contrast to the VC of rhyme unit of English. The final experiment, involving list recall, was considered especially important, as it involved the testing of preliterate children, whose results could not have been influenced by knowledge of the orthography. An attempt is made to explain these findings in terms of intrinsic properties of the syllables in the two languages. The theoretical significance of this research is also discussed.

In this article it is shown that Persian has core control constructions in which the obligatorily empty subject of an embedded clause takes its reference from an antecedent in the next higher clause. Evidence is provided that these embedded clauses are relatively transparent for scrambling and lack independent tense. It is therefore argued that core control verbs in Persian take complements that lack CP, TP, and a Case position for their subjects. Control complements do manifest subject agreement, however, suggesting that agreement checking takes place within vP. The implications of this view are explored with respect to the periphrastic progressive construction, in which both the auxiliary and the main verb bear subject agreement, and raising constructions, in which preposed subjects do not trigger agreement on the matrix verb. The relevant contrast is presented in minimalist terms as the idea that agreement in Persian is checked within a strong phase (CP or vP).

This article explores wh-questions in Persian and examines how the “clausal typing hypothesis” and the “focus-fronting analysis” fare with respect to Persian wh-questions. It is shown that Persian wh-questions involve obligatory movement of wh-phrases to a preverbal focus position. This movement is different from syntactic wh-movement in that it does not involve movement of the wh-phrase to [Spec, CP], whose trigger is a [+wh] feature in C. Thus, in terms of the typology of wh-questions, Persian is neither a syntactic wh-movement nor a wh-in-situ language; rather, it should be classified with languages such as Aghem, Basque, Hungarian, Kirundi, and Serbo-Croatian, in which wh-phrases have been argued to undergo focus movement. It is shown that Persian does not seem to share the properties of Serbo-Croatian, another focus-fronting language. Some possible explanations are provided and the theoretical implications are discussed.

Persian complex DPs exhibit structural peculiarities with respect to the placement of the object marker for specific DPs and the position of embedded CPs. This article discusses these peculiarities as well as the internal structure of Persian complex DPs and the distribution of clitic pronouns in this language. It is argued that a base generation approach accounts more adequately for Persian and other languages that exhibit the following properties: lack of a wh-relative pronoun, presence of an invariant relative complementizer, and alternation between a gap and a pronoun representing the relativized head. Regarding the postverbal position of the embedded CP, it is argued that extraposition and VP-remnant face theoretical and empirical problems, while V-raising and XP movement, as instances of scrambling triggered by focus in this language, provide an adequate explanation for Persian data.

This article investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of complex predicates in Persian in order to isolate the individual contributions of the verbal components. The event structure of causative alternation and unergative verbs is determined, based on a decomposition of the verbal construction into primitive syntactic elements consisting of lexical roots and functional heads, with the latter projecting all arguments of the verbal construction. An analysis is provided whereby the argument structure is not projected from the lexicon but is formed compositionally by the conjunction of the primitive components of the complex predicate in syntax. The dual behaviour of Persian complex predicates as lexical and syntactic elements, which has been attested in Persian literature on light verb constructions, follows naturally from the analysis proposed since there is no strict division between the level of word formation and the component manipulating phrasal constructs.

An examination of Pashto’s second-position pronominal clitics reveals that they are best regarded as agreement morphemes rather than as arguments of the verb. By base-generating these clitics as heads of agreement projections, their appearance in second position may be derived without recourse to phonological reordering rules, which have been necessary in earlier analyses.