Lexical categories in Persian

In this paper, we show that Persian lexical words fall into two groups: common word classes and mismatching words. The former can be classified as N, V, P and Adj/Adv according to their morphosyntactic behaviors, while the latter do not fall under any of the common lexical categories and remain unspecified with respect to their lexical categories. We also show that Persian lexical categories cannot easily be accounted for in lexical and feature-based approaches to parts of speech. We claim that the lexical categories of the language can be explained in a constructionist approach, in the spirit of Van Kampen (2005), in which lexical items are categorized as common word classes such as N and V if they have the chance to appear as the complements of functional heads, e.g. D and I, in syntactic structures; however, they remain as unspecified mismatching words if they are not directly used as the complement of functional heads.