The issue of "separability" in Persian complex predicates

This paper addresses the issue of separability in Persian complex predicates (CPs).These are syntactic combinations formed by a verb and a preverbal element (noun, adjective, preposition) realizing a single conceptual unit. Although the separability of the components of a CP by morphological and grammaticalized elements(e.g. auxiliaries) is not a matter of controversy, the possibility for “real” syntactic constituents to interrupt a CP continues to be debated. Building on an experimental study, we show that real syntactic material can separate the components of a CP and suggest that this separability can be viewed as a word order variation phenomenon, comparable to the one observed for direct objects (DO) and indirect objects (IO) in the preverbal domain. The semantic bond nevertheless plays a role in granting CPs some hallmarks of “wordhood”, favoring their adjacency, among other things