In Iranian languages, concatenating members in a nominal expression without Ezafe leads to syntactic and semantic ambiguities. Both endocentric and exocentric interpretations can be forced on Ezafe-less constructions. The problem ultimately is argued to follow from labeling indeterminacy in Ezafe-less constructions. It is, therefore, argued that Ezafe serves to resolve labeling conflicts in symmetric [XP, YP] sets, establishing an asymmetric relation between terms of the set. The semantic yield of the labeling resolution by Ezafe is the construction of phrasal objects receiving a compositional/ descriptive interpretation. Accordingly, the Alternation of Ezafe with (some) prepositions is argued to follow from the unique function both perform, i.e., resolving labeling conflicts.
