Different function of ‘magar’ in Persian; a diachronic view

The goal of this paper is to study the different functions of “ magar ” in Persian , based on data from texts in the past twelve centuries . The corpus of this study includes 24 books . Three hundred and sixty sentences using “ magar ” were extracted from the corpus . It was concluded that they have two main functions : interrogative function and non - interrogative function , each with its own syntactic features . However, in these 12 centuries, the interrogative function of "magar" shows an increasing trend and its non - interrogative function has been decreasing . It also seems that in the written texts, "magar" is passing from the non - subjectification stage to subjectification .