The “indifference-ke construction” in Modern Conversational Persian

Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2015

This paper sheds new light on Persian Linguistics; meanwhile to criticize the traditional trends pushed theoretical linguistics formal approach) and applied linguistics (Functional approach 1) part; as well as welcome the evidence and opportunities that this mixed approach provide for bringing them together. This model of analysis will be known as a mixed model that can achieve more comprehensive responses for Persian diversities than considering each approach in isolation. They're both are vital for Persian syntactic analyses; they are complementary. Relying on each approach is misleading. The main objective is to support this claim by evidence from Persian Language. The Persian evidence shows the constraints and varieties in this language is not only originated from syntactic principles, but also they are greatly motivated by pragmatic considerations. Therefore the variety of syntactic structures such as wh-constructions, sluicing, ditransitive verbs and obligatory adjuncts can not be determined or stipulated by the absolute formal constraints. As an evidence the first group of constructions will be discussed. Index Terms-formal approach, functional approach, mixed approach, Persian language 1 The difference between functional and Functional should be mentioned here. In this paper, Functional with capital F refers to all approaches and theories which are contrast to Formal approaches such as cognitive, discourse, information structure and typological explanations. For more information you can refer to Croft (2001).

There is a vast body of literature on semantic analyses of mood selection in complement clauses in Romance and Balkan languages (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997, Farkas 2003, Schlenker 2005, Villalta 2008, Siegel 2008, Giannakidou 2011 among others). Portner (2018) classifies the approaches into two major categories: truth-based approaches, and comparison-based approaches. According to the former, indicative is selected when the matrix predicate implies the truth of the complement clause in a designated set of worlds. Subjunctive is selected elsewhere. Schlenker (2005), Siegel (2008), Giannakidou (2011) belong to this group. In the comparison-based approaches, on the other hand, subjunctive is selected when the matrix predicate involves an ordering semantics, and indicative is selected elsewhere. Giorgi & Pianesi (1997) and Villalta (2008) fall into this group. There are also some studies which combine the two insights, e.g., Farkas’s (2003) analysis of emotive factives in Romance languages. In spite of this vast body of literature, mood selection in complement clauses in Persian, also known as Farsi, an Indo-European language which makes a three-way distinction between indicative, subjunctive and counterfactual has not received much attention yet. This study aims to fill this gap. Providing some semantic diagnostics, we divide the matrix predicates in Persian into propositional vs. non-propositional groups, and observe that while all three moods are available for the former group, the latter group only selects subjunctive. We argue that the mood selection in the propositional group is based on the truth of the complement proposition, while in the non-propositional group, subjunctive is selected as the default mood. We then put our generalization in the context of the existing approaches in both truth-based and comparison-based theories, and show that while Schlenker’s theory best captures the facts in Persian, none of the approaches can fully account for the data. We therefore refine Schlenker’s theory both in terms of modifying the conditions for the indicative mood and also adding the counterfactual mood to the framework, and thereby offer a formal account of the mood selection in complement clauses in Persian.

2015

This study pursues an explanation for Persian-English codeswitching in terms of language typological differences. In particular, it aims to show how English verbs occur in Persian structure and identify possible constraints, which occur between Persian and English verbal system. A mixed method design is chosen for the study and data collection includes tape-recordings of spontaneous conversations involving 12 Persian-English bilingual speakers. All bilingual complementiser phrases are transcribed, and all the classified English verbs are analysed to show how they occur in the bilingual, Persian-English complementiser phrases. The findings of the study reveal that the lack of congruity between the verbal system of Persian and English causes some constraints on the insertion of the English verbs. First, in all English elements in the findings of this study, there is no example that shows English verb occurs as a single unit in the Persian structure. Second, no single case in the findings of this study shows a combination of a Persian verbal morpheme and an English bare infinitive verb. Third, there is no example in the entire corpus that shows the combination of English verb and Persian negation element. Thus, the occurrence of Persian-English bilingual compound verbs is the result of the mentioned constraints between these two languages.

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2016

The current paper examines adjunct construction in Persian, which is an Indo-Iranian language. Various researchers have studied adjuncts and adjunction among different languages. Although Adjuncts and adjunction are very important in Persian language, none of the researchers have examined them based on the Minimalist Program and Functional Grammar. Therefore, the present study sought to review the records of Persian and non-Persian linguistic research studies and to introduce adverbs and prepositional phrases in Persian language. Then, their syntactic position was determined based on Radford (2004). The results showed that in Persian sentences, the structural differences could be made to follow from the semantic one. It was found that the view of adverbial licensing made the overall grammar more restrictive by banning reference to different syntactic structures for different semantic classes of adjuncts.

This thesis is concerned with the study of Persian cleft constructions within the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework. RRG, a structural-functional theory of language, intends to investigate the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics through the constituent, logical, and focus structure as independent, but interrelated domains of the paradigm. In this thesis, both the literary corpus-based and intuition-based data of Persian will be analyzed in order to display the specificational nature of the construction throughout the syntactic, semantic and informational domains. In Persian clefts, despite the fact that the clefted constituent is the semantic argument of the predicator of the relative clause, it bears the role of pragmatic predicate assigned by the matrix predicator and also the optional presence of the cleft pronoun (in case of clefted constituent being an NP). This fact originates from the non-isomorphic property of the cleft construction which expresses a single proposition via biclausal syntax. The agreement feature of copula with the clefted constituent and the focalizing function of matrix grammatical elements give rise to the consideration of the so-called demonstrative as emphatic pronoun which is projected in the PERIPHERY N . The distinction between the syntactic in 'this' in the extraposed sentences and the discoursally-interpreted in 'it' in the cleft sentences proves inevitable in this thesis. iv 6 CONTENTS PAGE Acknowledgement iii Abstract iv

Iranian studies, 2022

This paper aims to describe and explain the different morphosyntactic and semantic features of some double verb constructions in Persian, an Indo-European language mainly spoken in Iran. It is argued that these double verb constructions are not instances of serial verb construction, but instances of emerging aspectual verbs with varied degrees of grammaticalization. It is argued that numerous factors lead to grammaticalization of these verbs, including context, the semantic class of the verbs, and their frequency. A corpus-based analysis shows that these aspectual verbs have been grammaticalized in different ratios during the last one hundred years, demonstrating ongoing change in the Persian language.

The goal of this chapter is to provide a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG henceforth) analysis of cleft sentences in Persian with respect to the role of interaction over the domains of syntax, semantics and information structure. Clefting is functionally motivated by thematically marked expression of a single proposition via bi-partition syntax in the sense that a sequence of two clauses including a matrix and a cleft clause is employed in order to bring into focus an element that can be otherwise expressed as a non-focal element in the unmarked predicate-focus structure. This deviation from the unmarked predicate-focus structure feeds cleft sentences with a non-isomorphic/non-compositional feature that can be accounted for in terms of a constructional framework that encompasses the morphosyntactic, semantic and informational properties that a cleft construction has. RRG is equipped with a bi-lateral syntax-semantics representation that is enriched with discourse-pragmatic considerations which enables it to facilitate processing of linguistic properties of cleft constructions by means of constructional schemas. Non-compositionality in a cleft construction implies that the semantic composition of the whole cleft construction is not the "computable sum of the meaning of its parts" (Lambrecht 1994: 230). That is why a construction-based scrutiny will be necessary to explain how the mapping between semantics and information structure in clefting can be elucidated with respect to the syntactic juxtaposition of the constituents. It will be also discussed that there should be a necessity to distinguish between emphatic in in clefting and anaphoric in in extraposition in the Persian language with regard to the role of information structure that is distinctively formalized in the syntactic templates of the two constructions on the basis of the RRG constructional framework.

BLS39, 2016

Handout from ICIL, 2011