Document Type : Research Paper
Abstract
In any standard syntactic analysis, making a distinction between three levels of description is quite necessary. Having a critical overview of most important syntactic studies on Persian adverbial phrases, the writer found that this category remained to be thoroughly studied because the majority of the previous studies reflected an incomplete picture of the case. Recognizing that Persian adverbials and adjective phrases share many formal features, this study offers seven distributional criteria to distinguish between the two categories. In the domain of syntactic functions, four functions were discussed for this category. As far as semantic functions of Persian adverbials are concerned, they are too vast to be completely discussed in this paper. However, twelve of the most general ones are presented along with relevant examples. The present paper is an attempt to remove a number of misunderstandings regarding the nature of Persian adverbial phrases.
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