Progressive Construction in Persian: a Serial Verb Construction

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.

Iranian Studies, 2006

BLS39, 2016

Journal of the Institute for Sufi Studies, 2023

The concept of Sattelzeit was coined by Koselleck to identify a period of change and transformation in Europe beginning from the middle of eighteenth century in which the meaning of old concepts was changing to fit the conditions of a modern world and to account for the new relationship humans were developing with nature, history, and time. Koselleck focuses his analysis on concepts used in political discourse, specifically what he calls “basic concepts” without which communication in the realm of politics is notvpossible. Because they index newly emerged complex social and political realities, these concepts are highly complex, ambiguous, and contested.

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.

Studia Linguistica, 2006

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the Persian past tense form is projected into the future to designate events, states, and processes. While it must be admitted that the phenomenon under consideration is by no means confined to Persian, its examination in this language will reveal certain characteristics which are likely to contribute to a better understanding of how temporal deixis, together with aspectual and modal meanings, interact with contextual factors to yield socio-culturally relevant utterances. Of special theoretical interest in this respect are the semantic-pragmatic constraints levied, in varying degrees, on the projected tense in terms of negation, pronominal choice, speech act assignment, aspectual character, modal status, and pitch contour. Fundamental to the present study are three assumptions. First, the deictic projection at issue has pragmatic motivations, and, in addition, stems largely from the ontological asymmetry between pastness and futurity. Second, it has an indisputable edge over the other future-indicating devices available to Persian speakers in that it denotes factivity with respect to the occurrence of a situation. And third, it is stylistically marked as it digresses from the normal function of the past tense.

From Old to New Persian, In The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics, A. Sedighi and P. Shabani-Jadidi eds., Oxford, 2018, pp. 7-51 (sections 2.4 and 2.12-2.22, on New Persian, by P. Orsatti).

This chapter looks at the evolution of Persian, the only language to be substantially documented in all three periods of Old, Middle, and New Iranian on account of its close association with political centres over the centuries: Old and Middle Persian with the Achaemenids and the Sasanians, New Persian with Islamic powers. The chapter includes two parts, preceded by a survey of research on the three stages of Persian. The first part presents the documentation of Old and Middle Persian, discusses the innovations of Old Persian, and considers the transition from Old to Middle Persian. The second part deals with the rise of New Persian by taking into account Early Judaeo-Persian, Persian in Syriac script, Manichaean New Persian, and the early texts in Arabic script. It then discusses the main changes of the language in its literary and non-literary varieties until Contemporary New Persian.

Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference of Iranian Studies, ed. B. G. Fragner, 1995