The Syntax of Light Verbs in Pashto: A Minimalist Approach

Abstract

This study investigates the syntax of light verbs in Pashto, an Indo-Iranian language, using the theoretical framework of the Minimalist Program developed by Chomsky 1995, 2000). Light verbs, although contribute little semantic content, play a crucial syntactic role. Despite their prevalence, the syntactic behavior of light verbs in Pashto has not been extensively studied. This research seeks to fill this gap by providing a detailed syntactic analysis of these verbs. The nature of the study is descriptive, theoretical as well as comparative. The data for the study was collected from personal observation, Pashto books and other relevant sources. The analysis reveals that light verbs in Pashto occupy a specific syntactic position, acting as functional heads that select a lexical predicative category such as verb, noun and adjective as their complement. The resulting structure forms a single verbal predicate known as light verb constructions, where the light verb contributes nothing to semantics but provides the necessary syntactic flavor to the construction. The agreement between the light verb and the subject or object for features like gender, number, and person plays a significant role in sentence construction. Further research is recommended to explore the semantic and syntactic behavior of light verbs in Pashto.