Aspectual System in Luri and its Dialects

In this paper, we have analysed the aspectual system of three dialects of Luri, a west Iranian language which is spoken in south western, and in some areas of western part of Iran. About the classification of Luri dialects different opinions have been provided by various scholars. In this research, we follow Anonby (2003)’s classification, who has considered Luri as a language continuum consisting of three distinct languages: Luristani, Bakhtiyari and southern Luri, but we call them dialects of Luri. Despite their similarities to standard Persian, the Luri dialects share features that set them apart as a group from the standard language (McKinon, 2011). In this research, we have looked at the verbal construction in Luri and its aspectual system. Aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation' (Comrie, 1976:4). Hewson & Bubenik (1997:14) distinguish analytic and synthetic aspects in the Indo- European languages. In analytic aspect, there is an auxiliary which carries the tense marker, to which the lexical verb is dependant. On the other hand, in synthetic aspect, there is only a single word which may be marked for both tense and aspect. In these three West Iranian dialects, there are synthetic aspects as well as some analytic aspects, like their sister language Persian. The idea of the appearance of some periphrastic aspects and serial verb constructions to show the progressive aspect in some dialects of Luri can be considered as the impact of language contact, in which these dialects are getting influenced by Persian, the standard language of the country. Aspectual system in all of these three dialects is based on the ternary division between Perfective, Imperfective and Perfect aspect, like other Indo-European languages (see Hewson & Bubenik, 1997) It should be mentioned that we distinguish grammatical and lexical aspect and we are just looking at the system in grammatical aspect of Luri in this research.