Object

The Persian morpheme ra has attracted the attention of many linguists including Karimi (1989), Dabir-Moghaddam (1990) and Ghomeshi (1996) among others. Karimi takes ra as the accusative case marker, the presence of which on subjects and objects of prepositions render the sentence ungrammatical. According to Ghomeshi (1996), it marks DPs functioning as VP-level topics. Dabir-Moghaddam (1990) analyzes ra as the secondary topic marker in the Halidayian Functional grammar framework. In none of these analyses, this morpheme appear on deep subjects. In this article, it is highlighted that ra may also mark subjects, just in case it occurs in the right grammatical configuration. More specifically Persian has the category of small clause in which an NP marked with ra is the subject of the small clause rathar than object of the matrix sentence. This is an unprecedented hypothesis in Persian linguistic literature. I also present a minimalist account of the construction in question.

In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the way the Anthropocenic set of circumstances is narrated could not be easily explained away through giving precedence to either materialist or structuralist narratologists. In this sense, neither the materiality of the environment nor the arbitrary categories and models of structuralists such as Greimas could determine the ultimate narratological scheme with which one could make sense out of such set of circumstances. Only through modifying the extant narratological categories and models and exposing their arbitrariness via indicating their incapability to contain the formidable materiality of the environment, one could reach a workable semiotic framework for devising a narrative out of the anthropocenic set of circumstances. Reaching this framework would be the present study’s research objective. As its findings, the study recognizes that such a framework would not give the agency of devising narration to either non-human/environmental or human entities in the anthropocene, and at the same time will be the result of the uneasy, yet workable, coupling of these entities. This framework would also acknowledge the uncontainable nature of the environment in the anthropocene, and turn both human and non-human entities into mere actants that have no particular motivation. The study uses the modified narratological models of Algirdas Greimas and Amitav Gosh proposed by critics like Hanes Bergthaller, Marco Caracciolo and Jean Paul Petitimbert to reach this semiotic framework.