HAVE-progressive in Modern Persian: A Case of Pattern Replication

Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics, 2018

Modern Persian, also known as Farsi, has recently developed a periphrastic verbal construction to express the progressive and prospective aspects which uses the auxiliary dāštan(inf.)/dār- (pres. stem) ‘to have’. This construction was first reported in colloquial Persian by Zhukovskij (1888), and according to Windfuhr & Perry (2009:461), it has not “yet fully integrated into literary Persian”. This construction, in which both the auxiliary and the main verb get subject agreement, is syntactically limited in that it can be used only in the indicative mood and only in affirmative sentences. Bybee et al.'s (1994:128) study of progressive in various language families shows no case of possessive HAVE functioning as the auxiliary verb of progressive constructions, and therefore, the source of this construction in Persian has been the topic of a few studied. In this paper, we evaluate one of the few proposals made in the literature for the source of this construction, namely, the one which proposes borrowing from Mazandarani, an Iranian language spoken on the northwest shores of the Caspian Sea, into Persian (Pistoso 1974 and Shokri 2015). In this proposal, it is hypothesized that the phonological similarity between the present stem of the progressive auxiliary in Mazandarani, i.e., [dær] ‘(locative) to be’, with the present stem of ‘to have’ in Persian, i.e., [dɑr], has led the bilinguals of Mazandarani and Persian to replicate the Mazandarani progressive construction, which originally involves the auxiliary ‘locative be’, as a new construction in Persian which involves the auxiliary ‘to have’. We put this hypothesis in the context of current theories of pattern replication, particularly the framework of ‘pivot-matching’, as described in Matras & Sakel (2007), and evaluate the hypothesis against some diachronic data from Mazandarani. We argue that both the social status of the two languages and Mazandarani’s diachronic data suggest an influence on the other direction, i.e., from Persian to Mazandarani, which means that the source of HAVE-progressives in Persian needs to be sought somewhere else.

Iranian Studies, 2006

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2009

The present paper deals with the origin of the ezafe construction in Persian. It demonstrates how in Old Persian a relative pronoun (hya-) 'who/ which' in sentences with omitted copula was interpreted as a "connector"/ "linker" (ezafe marker) coming between a noun and another noun or adjective. As a result of this reanalysis a relative clause was recast into a noun phrase. I will argue that the loss of agreement and case marking (which were present in Old Persian) has affected the syntax of the noun phrase in Middle Persian and New Persian. The emergence of the ezafe construction to mark the genitive and attributive constructions (which were formerly implemented by the genitive case and agreement) compensates for this loss.

The Persian language in history, 2011

2023

This book draws on a detailed corpus analysis of fifth-century historiographical texts to explore the influence of the Iranian languages on the syntax of Armenian. While contact between the Iranian languages - particularly Parthian - and Armenian has been a fertile field of research for several decades, its effects on syntax have to date been somewhat neglected. Here, Robin Meyer argues that the Armenian periphrastic perfect construction with its unusual morphosyntactic alignment was created on the model of similar constructions in Parthian, along with a number of other syntagms. Unlike previous accounts, the language contact model presented in this book can explain all the idiosyncrasies of the construction, as well as its diachronic developments. The study also offers new insights into the historical social dynamics between Armenian and Parthian speakers, and suggests that the Parthians, who were the ruling class in the Armenian Kingdom for almost four centuries, eventually abandoned their native language.

Stephanie W. Jamison, H. Craig Melchert, and Brent Vine (eds.). 2015. Proceedings of the 26th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference.

The Iranian influence on Armenian has been well researched since the days of Hübschmann, but efforts have concentrated on lexical borrowing and calques. Like Meyer (2013), this paper suggests that on the level of syntax, too, Iranian (particularly Parthian) has had great influence on Armenian. The transitive periphrastic perfect, which is construed with a participle, genitive subject and accusative object accompanied by an optional static 3.Sg. copula, is shown to be the likely outcome of Parthian split-ergative alignment.

Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Central Asian Languages and Linguistics (ConCALL) , 2015

Since its first mention in 1888, Modern Persian progressive construction with dāštan “to have” has received little attention as far as its tense domain and source are concerned. Based on an analysis of 143 cases of present and past progressive tenses collected from several literary works between 1907 and 2010, this paper presents an account of the development of this newly formed yet ever-increasingly used construction in Modern Persian. Applying Vendler’s (1967) framework to classify the situations, this analysis shows that the progressive construction is used with achievement, accomplishment and activity situations, mostly denoting an imminent action in the case of achievements, and an ongoing action in the case of accomplishments and activities. Furthermore, in the light of the distinctive structure of this construction, which is identified as a Serial Verb Construction (SVC), the SVC with bar dāštan “to set off” is proposed as the source of the construction in question.

1 Den Besten's (1983) influential work on verb-second phenomenon indicates a breakthrough in post-80 generative tradition. His treatment of verb-second as a V-to-C movement can be regarded as a initial step towards a comparative syntax of the languages of the world. Pollock's (1989) classical paper and his split IP hypothesis was based on verb movement capacities and the potential landing sites. The above remarks can be taken to mean roughly that verb movement is a prominent phenomenon in syntax and any modifications in its treatment can lead to far-fetching theoretical consequences. For instance, it is now a fact that the verb can cross (i.e. move past) some categories but not others. In this paper, I am going to consider the relevant literature and propose some hypotheses concerning the nature of movement, linguistic representation, and the interfaces. As this is only a summary of my about 100-page dissertation, mainly theoretical problems are discussed here and it is of course for the sake of saving space.