The number of simplex verbs in Persian is limited to around 250, only half of which are currently used by the speech community1. The verbal lexicon is thus mainly formed of syntactic combinations, including a verb and a non-verbal element, a noun, eg qadam zadan ‘to walk’(Lit.‘step hit’), an adjective, eg deraz kešidan ‘to lay down’(Lit.‘long pull’), a particle, eg bar daštan ‘to take’(Lit.‘PARTICLE have’), or a prepositional phrase, eg be kar bordan ‘to use’(Lit.‘to work take’). These combinations are generally referred to as Complex Predicates

∗ This work was supported by the bilateral project PerGram, funded by the ANR (France) and the DGfS (Germany)[grant no. MU 2822/3-I] and is related to the work package LR4. 1 of the Labex EFL (funded by the ANR/CGI). We would like to thank Gwendoline Fox for her helpful comments. 1 Sadeghi (1993)’s estimation is 252 (115 commonly used) and Khanlari (1986) provides a list of 279 simplex verbs.