Iranian languages exhibit a phenomenon, not attested in European and some other languages, the so-called Complex Predicates. Complex Predicates are found not only in Iranian (in particular – Ossetic), but also in other languages, not related to Iranian by origin or typologically. In other words, complex predicates as a typological phenomenon realize a universal property of human language. The paper identifies two main problems: to define the universal character of Complex Predicates as a typologically persistent phenomenon and to establish the characteristic properties of the Complex Predicates in Ossetic. The Ossetic Complex Predicates demonstrate a range of characteristic properties that define them as a grammatical whole. These properties are: the common prefix on the whole construction; the common stress; the fixed position of negation; the fixed word order inside the construction; the constraint on the branching of the elements inside the construction.

Keywords: complex predicates, typology, Iranian languages, lexicon, morphology.

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