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Aspectual Verb Constructions in Persian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2022

Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand Open the ORCID record for Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand [Opens in a new window]  and
Mehdi Parizadeh
Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand*
Affiliation:
Linguistics Department, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
Mehdi Parizadeh*
Affiliation:
Linguistics Department, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
*
Emails: [email protected]; [email protected]
Emails: [email protected]; [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

aspectual verbsauxiliary verbsfrequencygrammaticalizationserial verb construction
Type
Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 993 - 1013
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies

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