‘To lie’ or ‘to deceive’? The case alternation of the Old Persian verb duruj-

This paper deals with the coexistence of two different constructions of the Old Persian verb duruj-, usually translated ‘to lie’, ‘to deceive’. Besides a prevalent one-argument construction, in few occur-rences this verb is employed with a second argument encoded by the geni-tive or by the accusative. After an analysis which takes into account com-parative and typological data, it is argued that the semantic fuzziness, as well as the low degree of transitivity of duruj-, are probably the main rea-sons its morphosyntactic behavior, which most likely constitutes one of the rare instances of argument alternation in this language.