Goal- Source Asymmetry in Preposition Omission: Motion Verbs "âmadan" (come) and "raftan" (go)

Drawing on Talmy’s (2000a, 2000b [2007]) lexicalization framework for motion events, this study investigates the asymmetrical behavior of source and goal expressions in the process of preposition omission in the two high-frequency Persian motion verbs âmadan (‘come’) and raftan (‘go’). A corpus of 1,000 sentences containing these two verbs was extracted from the Bijankhan written corpus, and the patterns of preposition omission in the encoding of source and goal were analyzed. The findings confirm the presence of goal bias in Persian: while goal is realized without an overt preposition in approximately 40% of the data, source is never expressed without a preposition. The most significant finding is the identification of four distinct structural patterns of goal preposition omission, ranging from direct omission to postposed constructions. These patterns demonstrate that goal preposition omission is not a uniform process but is realized through systematic structural strategies. Whereas goal is encoded through a range of alternative encoding strategies, source remains constrained to a fixed and obligatory syntactic pattern.

Furthermore, although the overall rate of goal preposition omission is nearly identical in âmadan and raftan, the structural realization of this process differs across the two verbs. This finding suggests that the lexical semantics of the verb does not alter the existence of goal bias itself; rather, it influences the structural patterns through which the bias is realized. Accordingly, explaining goal bias requires consideration of the interaction among semantic, syntactic, cognitive, and pragmatic factors.