Mental states via possessive predication: the grammar of possessive experiencer complex predicates in Persian.

Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with 'to have' that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Language 91(3):533-563, 2015; Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34:93-106, 2016; Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property concepts, Oxford University Press, 2017). Augmented with an analysis of prepositional phrases introducing the target of the mental state and an approach to gradability in terms of measure functions (Wellwood in Measuring predicates, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014), the analysis explains various properties of possessive experiencer complex predicates, including the behavior of target phrases, the ability of the non-verbal element to be modified by a range of adjectives, the direct participation of the non-verbal element in comparative constructions, and the ability of degree expressions to modify both the non-verbal element and the VP containing the complex predicate.