Placement events in Farsi : a study of caused motion in Farsi

Abstract: Talmy’s typology of motion events has been studiously explored from a range of angles, but few have focussed on the domain of caused motion. The few languages that have been studied in the domain of caused motion did not include Farsi. This thesis covers this research gap, and provides a first account of one type of caused motion, namely placement events, in Farsi, with the aim of finding out if they conform to Talmy’s binary typology. The study was conducted in Tehran, Iran, using the elicitation tool from the PUT project, in which participants are asked to describe certain situations, targeting caused motion. Fifteen participants’ descriptions are analysed in this thesis. The results unearth four main verbs for describing a placement event (gozāštan ‘to put’, rixtan ‘to spill, to pour’, andāxtan ‘to drop, to throw’, kardan ‘to do’), and three prepositions (tu ‘in’, ru ‘on’, be ‘to’). Furthermore, it is clearly shown that Farsi encodes PATH in prepositions, only occasionally inferring them from context. Finally, the results decisively show that placement events in Farsi are S-framed and thus conform to Talmy’s typology.