The Semantic Behavior of Reciprocal Verbs in the Persian language

This study investigates the semantic behavior of reciprocal verbs in Persian and their participants. A reciprocal verb entails participants in complementary roles and may conceptually comprise several identical interactions. The data for this research are drawn from the Persian Semantic Role Corpus (Mirzaei & Moloudi, 2014) and include more than nine hundred reciprocal verbs. The identified verbs are classified according to the semantic roles of agent, patient, and theme—and their reciprocal counterparts—within the framework of Levin (1993) and its extension in VerbNet. The results show that, in addition to verbs with co-agent, co-patient, and co-theme that can be traced within Levin’s classification, Persian also exhibits a group of verbs with co-experiencer roles, representing a shared experience or emotion between two participants. These findings provide a more comprehensive picture of the semantic categorization of reciprocal verbs in Persian and can contribute to role-semantic analysis, Persian language pedagogy, and the development of meaning-based linguistic resources such as semantic lexicons and natural language processing systems.