A Minimalist Approach to Subject-Verb Agreement in Persian

Persian exhibits subject- verb number agreement but agreement is optional if the subject is an inanimate plural noun. The goal of this article is to examine the effect of grammatical and conceptual factors on the production of optional number agreement in Persian. The minimalist approach has been used as the framework in which agreement is governed solely by syntactic information. But according to maximalist approach, it seems that both conceptual and syntactic information influence agreement during the grammatical encoding. While most work on agreement has dealt with ungrammatical sentences, Persian allows the grammatical use of either number matched or mismatched verbs for inanimate plural noun subjects. A judgment task is used to test the participants' acceptance of sentences in some experiments with matched and mismatched verbs and their interpretation of the thematic role of the subject nouns. The results of the experiment show the effect of conceptual information in subject- verb agreement. These results demonstrate the importance of non-syntactic factors in subject verb number agreement in Persian.