Persian Subjunctives: The Alleged Inflected Infinitives in Persian?

This article is a syntactic exploration of subjunctive constructs in Persian. Based on Lotfi’s (2008) and Ghomeshi’s (2001) proposals, the subjunctive in Persian is the closest thing to English infinitives that Persian affords, although contrary to English it is still inflected for agreement. By regarding Persian subjunctives as infinitives, there could be this hunch that they are allegedly similar to the inflected infinitives in certain Romance languages like Portuguese. By exploiting data from Persian and scrutinizing the characteristics of the inflected infinitives proposed by Iverson and Rothman (2008),this researcher tries to show such a hunch is unjustifiable. He further seeks to concludes that the Persian subjunctive constructs cannot be tentatively regarded as the closest counterpart of the infinitives in a given language like English, because of both having the features [+tense] and [+agree].