mohammad rasekh mahand

In the discussion between basic and non-basic voices, many researchers consider verb change as the main factor in non-basic voices. For instance, in Persian, both the passive voice and causative constructions exhibit such characteristics, utilizing markers to indicate passive and causative verbs. However, from a functional-typological perspective, every construction is defined based on function(s) it plays. The same construction may have various strategies across different languages. One of these strategies could involve changes in the form of the verb, but other strategies also exist for each construction. This paper aims to define the functions of two non-basic constructions: the anti-passive construction and the applicative construction. In the anti-passive construction, the patient role is downgraded and becomes less prominent, while in the applicative construction, the oblique participant becomes more prominent and becomes object, concurrently causing a downgrade in the prominence of the agent. We attempt to demonstrate which strategies Persian employs to represent these two constructions. Through this functional analysis, we will examine the reasons for the existence of these constructions in Persian and their typological relationship with other languages.

In Persian dialect of Hamedan, there are some negative sentences which do not mark polarity. In cross-linguistic studies, these structures are called expletive negatives. They are formally negative, but logically positive. Based on a fieldwork data, I have shown that expletive negatives occur in temporal adverb clauses of ‘since, until, as soon as, before’, adverbial clauses of unexpected or impossible event, and clauses showing regret and complain. I have argued that the shared function of expletive negative in these concepts is to show a kind of epistemic modality. The meaning conveyed in these contexts is uncertainty, impossibility and unwillingness. Hence, the negative marker does not show polarity, but a kind of epistemic modality. The prevalence of this structure in Hamedani dialect is due to its long contact with Turkish, a language which has many instances of expletive negative. Hamedani Persian has borrowed this structure from 'before' adverb clauses of Turkish.

AbstractFlexibility in idioms may occur at different lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic levels. In flexible idioms, the core meaning remains unchanged. This descriptive-analytical study aims to investigate flexibility in Persian Idioms at the above-mentioned levels. The corpus contains 427 examples containing 160 "Hand-Idioms" in Najafi (1387/2008). The findings show that lexical flexibility occurs through the process of addition (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, quantifiers) and substitution (verbs and prepositions); morpho-syntactic flexibility happens through the addition of the plural marker "-ha" and the indefinite marker "–ya", and the syntactic flexibility happens through "postposing", "scrambling", "causative and intransitive structures", "objects substitution" and the addition of the "complements". Furthermore, it was found that Persian "Hand-Idioms" are more inclined towards "addition" and factors such as "definiteness", "information structure", "linguistic economy", "specification" and "expression of quantity" cause the motivation for the flexibility of the idioms. The findings of this research can be used by the authors of books on teaching idioms to non-Persian speakers and the relevant teachers to provide the learners with appropriate examples to show the features of flexible idioms.

A resumptive pronoun is a pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent. The use of resumptive pronouns in relative clauses appears to be governed by structural complexity in grammar and usage. Hawkins’s (2004) Efficiency and complexity in grammars predicts a parallel effect in usage: when the grammar permits the option of either resumptive pronoun or gap, resumptive pronouns should be used more often as structural complexity increases. By the results of four experiments including processing assessment, production task, an acceptability judgement task and listening experiment, the relation of relative clauses’ weight and the presence of a resumptive pronoun with an objective antecedent or lack of it is verified. The hypothesis was that with the increase of grammatical weight of relative clause, the need for a resumptive pronoun will be more. Finally, the results of four experiments are analyzed by SPSS software. The results which were based on the hypothesis, were not meaningful. It means that the presence or absence of resumptive pronoun in different grammatical weights does not make a meaningful difference. It means Persian speakers use lots of resumptive pronouns without attention to grammatical weights of relative clause.

Language is a social phenomenon. What happens in society is reflected in language. For this reason, the social study of language can reveal facts about the language community. If a society is violent, rude or sad, it manifests itself in language. With this assumption, the present paper examines the rate of the three social characteristics of violence, politeness, and sadness and happiness and its reflection in the Persian language in the last five decades. The two main questions of the research are: Has the Persian-speaking community become more violent, rude and sad in the last five decades? Is there a connection between important political and social events and the rate of these changes? To answer these questions, a corpus from the past five decades were analysed, including movies, newspapers, stories, speeches by politicians, and songs. The corpus was divided into five decades, in each decade one or more important political and social events took place in the country: the fifties (revolution), the sixties (war), the seventies (construction and reformations), the eighties (kindness and election issues), and the nineties (moderation and sanctions). In this corpus, we have sought to find, analyse and determine the frequency of language tools that show the desired characteristics such as metaphors, adjectives, forms of address, and taboo words. This study shows that generally the Persian-speaking community has become more violent, rude, and sad at least in the last two decades. There is also a clear relationship between the main socio-political events in each decade and the rate of increase or decrease of these characteristics.

Lack of specialized studies in the field of feeling of surprise compared to other feelings directed the present study to examine the schema and concept of feeling of surprise in Persian from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Objectives include drawing a surprise scheme for the Persian language and examining the productivity of source domains for this feeling. The emotion schema shows the specific structure of the feeling of surprise in Persian and the way it is displayed. In order to draw the schema, a lexical approach is used and the keywords of the feeling of surprise and the interpretations that existed in the metaphorical culture of Abolhassan Najafi, were examined. Then, based on Kovecses’ hypothesis, the metaphorical source domains and their frequencies were determined based on corpus approach. The results showed that in the schema of feeling surprise, due to lack of control and activity, the feeling of surprise is somewhat different from other feelings. The body domain has many uses for showing the feeling of surprise, and also the tendency for immobility and stillness is evident in most cases of surprise.

The main function of discourse markers is to make connections between the discourse and the discourse situation, thus managing the interaction between speaker and listener, expressing the speaker's attitude, and organising the flow of discourse. In this research, different functions of the pragmatic marker diye in the Hamedani dialect were examined. To achieve this goal, around six hours of audio and video files of the Hamedani dialect corpus were used. Diye is a high-frequency pragmatic marker in the Hamedani dialect and has several functions. For example, our results show that this pragmatic marker is used for interpersonal functions such as expression of attitudes, emphasis, and confirmation-seeking, as well as for indirect responses (in order to evade the subject and appeal to shared knowledge between speaker and listener). In terms of textual function, it helps to keep or relinquish the floor, show a sequence of events, or end a topic, or to express an explanation, justification, contradiction, addition, or conclusion in relation to a previous or subsequent proposition. Examining the intonation of diye with Praat software shows that the intonation pattern of this pragmatic marker varies, depending on its particular function.

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 .

This paper aims to investigate postposing in Modern spoken Persian. Persian is a verb-final language; however, some constituents frequently follow the verb and appear in the post - verbal domain. Among the factors motivating this phenomenon, one of them is grammatical weight. The universal tendency proposed by typologists is the “short-before-long principle”; locating the heavy constituents after the light ones in order to ease the process of production and comprehension. Some studies advocate the position of long constituents before short ones in verb-final languages like Japanese and Korean. Based on the Persian spoken corpus, this research analyzes the postposed constituents according to their grammatical weight. It is observed that the heavier constituents are postposed more easily compared with the light ones; supporting the universal trend of placing heavy constituents after the light ones.

This study investigated grammatical gender in Āmora’I language. This language is spoken in Āmora village in Khalajestan rural area in Qom province. It has two grammatical genders: Masculine and Feminine. Feminine gender is marked by inflectional suffixes '-a' and '-iya'. This suffix appears as -a in consonant ending words and -iya in vowel ending words. These markers are added to nouns, pronouns, indefiniteness markers, adjectives and verbs to distinguish the gender of a word. The grammatical gender of the verb, adjective, pronoun and indefinite marker is determined based on the gender of head in noun phrase. The gender agreement is a regular-based method for distinguishing the gender of nouns in the rest of the components of the sentence. The gender agreement of verbs with adjectives is also observed with any type of noun (human, animate and inanimate) and with plural nouns. While indefinite marker agreement can be seen only in singular names attributed to humans. The verb gender agreement is only possible for past tenses. In this agreement, although third person singular pronoun which expresses the gender marker but also, it is true for all other persons.

In this research, we have had an exact categorization for different kinds of derivational , compound and derivational-compound present participles in the frame of typological prototypes which is a universal approach towards the parts of speech. In this theory, prototypical and with no morphemes adjectives belong to the semantic class of ‘property’ and to ‘modification’ in terms of propositional act constructions. These prototypical adjectives should be simple and without any morphemes on the basis of structural coding of typological prototypes theory. And the adjectives which are not simple and have morphemes, are considered as marked and non- prototypical adjectives. present participles do not act similarly and are not uniform on the basis of behavioral potential. So, they are not in the same level. They are different in terms of their adjectival, nominal functions. By studying present participles in this research, it is shown that they follow the both criterion of typological prototype, and on the basis of these criterion they are non-prototypical adjectives in Persian. In other words, they are unmarked category in terms of both structural coding and behavioral potential. Finally, their position is specified on the semantic map and their behavioral potentials are shown through diagrams

In this research, we have had an exact categorization for different kinds of derivational and derivational-compound past participles in the frame of typological prototypes which is a universal approach towards the parts of speech. In this theory, prototypical  adjectives with no morphemes belong to the semantic class of ‘property’ and to ‘modification’ in terms of propositional act constructions. These prototypical adjectives should be simple and without any morphemes on the basis of structural coding of typological prototypes theory. Furthermore, the adjectives which are not simple and have morphemes, are considered as marked and non- prototypical adjectives. Indeed, the structural coding criterion specifies only that the marked member is encoded by at least as many morphemes as the unmarked member (croft, 1999:73). This generalization is an implicational universal. If a language codes a typologically unmarked member of a grammatical category by n morphemes (n > 0), then it codes a typologically marked member of that category by at least n morphemes. Past participles which are studied in this research, are marked and are not simple structurally. They are divided to derivational and derivational- compound ones which have all morphemes. Derivational past participles are made by the past stem of verb + a suffix (-h) and the derivational-compound past participles are made by a noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun + derivational past participle (stem of a verb+ suffix(h)). Therefore, they are not prototypical in terms of their structure and their different semantic class. Typological markedness also constrains the distribution of constructions exhibiting the behavioral potential of the categories; if a construction encoding the behavioral potential of members of a grammatical category is found in that category, it is found with at least the unmarked member of that category for that construction.

In this research, examples of derivational and derivational-compound past participles are collected from the definitions and classifications of Persian grammarians and linguists. Then the examples of past participles are verified based on the typological criteria; structural coding and behavioral potential. All the examples are studied through the consideration of their adjectival and nominal behavioral potentials. Finally, their status and positions are specified in the Croft’s parts of speech semantic map. Then the new classification of past participles regarding their nominal and adjectival behaviors are placed in the behavioral diagrams.

Past participles do not act similarly and are not uniform on the basis of behavioral potential. Therefore, they are not in the same level. Some derivational past participles are used both with adjectival and nominal behavioral potentials. Some of them are used only in modification and propositional constructions and with nominal behavioral criteria.  Some are used only in modification and propositional constructions.  Some of derivational-compound past participles are used as both adjectives and nouns. Some of them are used only in modification and propositional constructions and with nominal behavioral criteria. Moreover, some are used only in propositional constructions with all of nominal behavioral potentials which are considered as marked nouns. In this research, past participles behavioral potential is verified and at last it is shown that they follow the behavioral potential of typological prototype theory. Totally, their behavioral potential is not more than the behavioral potentials of unmarked nouns. Hence, they are marked category in terms of both structural coding and behavioral potential.  Finally, their position is specified on the semantic map and their behavioral potentials are shown through diagrams. The position of derivational and derivational-compound past participles on the semantic map are considered as ‘action’ in terms of semantic class and ‘modification’ in terms of propositional act. Because in all derivational and derivational-compound past participles, we have used an action for the propositional act of modification. In other words, by marking and adding morphemes to an action as a semantic class, we have used it for acting as modification. Therefore, the position of past participles is shown in the semantic map as figure 1 below.

Derivational and derivational-compound past participles’ new classifications on the basis of their adjectival, nominal or both are placed on the behavioral diagrams. behavioral potentials are shown by ovals and the positions of past participles are shown by (*) in the ovals.  One oval is dedicated to adjectival criteria. One oval is dedicated to nominal criteria. These ovals have some common spaces which are considered for past participles which have both the adjectival and nominal behavioral potential.

The following paper aims at investigating Persian formal and substantive idioms which include “agar (if)” within the framework of construction grammar. Conventionally, “agar (if)” is used in Persian conditional sentences. Following Fillmore et al. (1998), this study attempts to investigate the peculiar syntactic, semantic and phonological features of “agar (if)-constructions” which differentiate them from the regular conditional sentences. Formal “agar (if)-constructions” indicate weak possibilities, denial, certainty, persuasion, emphasis, and threat while substantive “agar (if)-constructions” denote wishes, haste, requests, impossibilities, and objection. The findings showed that formal “agar (if)-constructions” are inclined towards unfamiliar syntactic structures while substantive “agar (if)-constructions” tend to prefer familiar syntactic constructions. Moreover, changes in the word order and the tense could change the idiomatic interpretation in both formal and substantive idioms. Falling intonation is also an idiosyncratic feature in some formal and substantive “agar (if)-constructions”.

One of the most puzzling facts about human language is also one of the most basic: Words occur according to a famously systematic frequency distribution such that there are few very high-frequency words that account for most of the tokens in text and many low-frequency words. In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. One aspect that all dynamical models of grammar emphasize is that frequency of occurrence is an important determinant of linguistic structure and language use. This paper surveys the effects of frequency on Aspects in Persian and considers the correlation between Frequency and the numbers of different types of Aspect member in Persian. Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, extends over time. Based on Bybee (1985, 1995, 201, 2003, 2006, 2011) and Haspelmath (2002, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2014) and Croft (2003), we try to clarify the frequency effect in decreasing numbers of different types of aspects in Persian. frequency-based form minimization, is probably the most important economy effect that shapes grammatical systems. Since Greenberg(1966a) and Croft (1990), this economy effect has been widely known, and has often been discussed under the heading of markedness. We conclude that There is a Reverse Relationship between the number of different types of aspect members and the frequency.

This paper studies some of the less-studied constructions in Persian in which a dependent describes a participant in a clause. The participants which are described or attributed a feature are normally subject and object, but sometimes complements, too. These dependents are either complements or adjuncts. The complements could be subject complements, object complements and complement of prepositional complement. The participant-oriented adjuncts include adverbial adjuncts and predicative adjuncts. The adverbial adjuncts are agent-oriented adverbs. The predicative adjuncts are in three groups: resultative, predicative and circumstantial. This paper introduces this novel categorization of participant-oriented dependents with some criteria to distinguish among them.

This article intends to investigate the presence of coherence tools in one tenth of Harriri's Maghamat by comparing the original text with its translation based on Halliday's systematic functional grammar theory. In this theory, language is the main instrument to convey culture and every element of it is introduced by the certain role in whole language system. In this system, different tools which indicate coherence in the text are applied. By utilizing Halliday's functional grammar, this survey makes an effort to specify the degree of coherence tools exist in certain statistical group, that is Five Maghameh from Harriri's quintet Maghamat: Maghamat like Dinariyeh, Borghaidiyeh, Marviyeh, Shiraziyeh, and Tenisiyeh which represent the whole Maghmat not only from the content point of view (justifying poverty and beggary) but also from thoroughness coherence of language and text point of view. By investigating original text and its translation based on the theory, these results were achieved. Firstly, in the main text and its translation because of the dual approach of the translator (free and literal translation), as well as the difference in the semantic terms of the word and the structure of the grammatical and original language, the degree of cohesion is not quantitatively the same in tools such as elimination, synonymy, collocation, and hyponymy.Secondly, Despite Harriri's extraordinary attention to rhetoric and negligence of writing techniques, at first the text seems to be a little aimless and unclear. Both the book and its translation contain the capacity of reflecting the degree of coherence tools. The book also enjoys triple features of linguistic, narrative storytelling, social enlightenment and coherence elements.

One of the important functions of language is conveying each person’s emotions to another people. Emotions are abstract concepts that should be converted into concrete concepts in order to become comprehensible; Metaphors and adjectives are common tools for changing abstract concepts to concrete ones. In this study we try to answer the following question: “Has the Persian language changed regarding to the use of violent verbal tools?” In order to answer this question, we have to understand if the mental and cognitive representation of anger in language has had an ascending development or a descending one? One of the representations of expressing emotions such as anger in everyday language is through the daily newspapers published in that language. In other words, the text of a newspapers reflects the thoughts and speeches of that society. Thus, the study of anger in this research has been limited to the metaphors representing anger in Persian and also the adjectives that using this emotion in a corpus consisting of Persian newspapers. This paper is based on the theory of conventional metaphors in such important papers as Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and Lakoff 1993. The metaphors are recognized here according to the Metaphor Identification Process (MIP) in Pragglejaz (2007). In sum, 100 editorial or leading articles, 2 important and bestselling newspapers, namely ‘Keyhan’ and ‘Ettelaat’ which have an archive of at least 50 years (50 of each newspaper and 1 of each year) were chosen randomly for this research and 18 source domains were identified for the metaphors. The importance of this study is that, it reveals the changes in using violence in Persian according to a natural and real corpus of popular newspapers published in Persian, and also shows its relationship with the important social and political changes of each decade. This way, a cognitive pattern of Persian based on the development of violence change in this language and its representation in Persian newspapers will be achieved. The results of this study shows that the political and social factors have been influential in the development of violence change in Persian newspapers.

Cognitive models of depression propose that negative schemas and Early Maladaptive Schema contribute to depressive symptoms. The purpose of this study is to identify the early maladaptive Schema of patients with depression disorder. The method of study is descriptive. Research statistics involves all patients with depression disorder who have come to the counseling centers of Tehran and Hamadan. The method of sample choosing is stratified sampling.  This study was conducted among 120 patients with depression disorder.  Instruments in this study were included Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and Short Form of Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ). The analysis of the results showed high correlation between early maladaptive schema and symptoms of depression disorder (P < 0.05).Regression analysis showed that early maladaptive schema of social isolation/alienation, enmeshment/undeveloped self andemotional inhibitionwere independent predictors of depression disorder.  The results of the present study indicate that identifying schema of depression in patients can help them understand the predisposing factors of their problem.

In the framework known as processing approach to grammar, it is argued that processing provides a full-fledged functional explanation for all syntactic phenomena including constituent ordering. Linguistic structure is simply built in a way that eases processing difficulty of sentences and results in efficiency of language use. It seems that the operation of that part of the linguistic representation system that leads to formulation of concepts utilizing lexical access procedure is governed by processing mechanisms. The processing mechanisms, as it has put forward by Hawkins (1994) are those that make it possible for humans to recognize (and produce) grammatical structure in a rapid and efficient manner. The formulator is also planned in a way that minimizes the processing load. Therefore, it appears that some ordering regularities and grammatical constraints in word order and syntactic phenomena such as movement are motivated by the flawless performance of this phase of human linguistic processor. According to performance theory and efficiency principles, constituent ordering is influenced by processing efficiency, i.e. the ordering of constituents is intended to facilitate processing. The research aims to study the processing basis of relativisation and syntactic movement known as scrambling and the effects of grammatical weight in Persian by drawing upon evidence from self-paced reading. Adopting an online reading time paradigm, the research was aimed at studying the role of grammatical weight in likelihood of post-verbal movement and processing loads of pairs of corresponding sentences. Hypotheses: Questions increasing the motivation and triggering initiation of doing this research are how different structural configurations of sentences with identical truth condition modify processing level and if the increase of grammatical weight could result in likelihood of syntactic movement. The final questions are how the movement of grammatically heavy constituents including relative clause and scrambled constituents explained in terms of processing implications. Accordingly, four hypotheses were developed in the course of the research. The aforesaid paradigm, as an efficient experimental technique to assess processing speed of syntactic structures, was designed by Open Sesame Software. Two sets of 24 sentences in three levels of weight (light, medium and heavy) and two structural levels (unmarked preverbal constituent and post-verbal one) were presented to 40 randomly selected Persian-speaking participants (between the ages 18 and 40) with university education. The first set consisted of sentences containing relative clause in two configurations and the second set of pairs of scrambled (post-verbal) and unscrambled sentences. Sentences were followed by a yes/no question. Data was analyzed using SPSS and ANOVA test. Findings: In light level, the mean reading time of sentences with canonical constituent ordering was less than those with post-verbal constituents. However, this trend got reversed by the increase of grammatical weight of the constituent subjected to scrutiny. In other word, the post-verbal movement of constituents resulted in reduction of mean reading time in medium-weight sentences. This decline was markedly more significant in heavy sentences. The ordering of constituents and the likelihood of movement is highly weight-sensitive. As a conclusion, the end-weight principle as an incentive to optimize the processing efficiency was approved in Persian.

This study is to determine how bilingualism could influence the list of Persian basic color terms and their order. Using a monolingual Persian and a bilingual Kurd sample students, and a color list task, it is assumed that bilingualism could change the ordering of the non-basic color terms in the second language, but not the basic ones. Another assumption is that, the old usual methods for obtaining mean position and saliency, based on Sutrop (2001) would not determine the BCTs in Persian. The data suggest that Persian has 6 BCTs; Qermez, Âbi, Sabz, Zard, Siyâh, and Sefid. The BCTs are retrieved by monolinguals much faster than bilinguals. Mean Position and frequency in school and university students had differences in number supporting the hypothesis that staying for more than two years in a bilingual environment and L2 use frequency are the two effective factors in BCTs order.

Motion is one of the most fundamental human,s experiences. So it seems to be expressed as a universal concept in all languages of the world. According to Talmy,s lexicalization patterns theory(1985, 2000), languages are divided into two types concerning motion expression: verb-framed and satellite-framed. In verb-framed languages the core component of motion event, path, is expressed in verb and the manner of motion in satellite but in satellite-framed languages the reverse of this happens. The aim of this paper is to study the position of the Hawrami language in Talmy,s two-category typology. For this purpose, 140 Hawrami motion verbs (simple and non-simple) have been collected through interview with 20 native speakers over 30 years old and analyzed. Data analysis indicates that the Hawrami language challenges Talmy,s two-category typology since the semantic elements of path and manner are lexicalized in the verb root nearly equally. In other words, Hawrami has the characteristic of both verb-framed and satellite-framed languages and so it cannot be placed exactly in one of Talmy,s two types. It is better that its behavior in expressing motion event be evaluated with regard to the continuum of manner salience (Slobin, 2004) and path salience (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2004). Thus Hawrami is placed in the middle parts of these two continuums. Moreover, as the pattern (motion path manner) is the third most frequent lexicalization pattern in Hawrami, this language also has the characteristic of equipollently-framed languages (Slobin, 2004).

Dependency is one of the significant relations in syntactic elements. . In subordination, a unit is subordinated to another. One kind of subordination is complement clauses. In this study, the rate of semantic and syntactic integration is discussed. Relying on semantic factors, successfulness of main clause verb, co-reference and co-temporality of main clause and complement clause; complement-taking verbs of Farsi are put in different classes of dependence. the presence or absence of complementizer in complement clauses, co-lexicalization or case-marking of the subject and the object are marked in clauses to see which verbs show the most bond in main clauses and complement clauses by studying the semantic factors including the tense of complement clauses. The complement clauses with the most bonds dealing with main clauses tend to join to in a single sentence. It is revealed in this research that manipulation verbs have the most bonds between complement clauses and main clauses and their tendency in such verbs to join in a single sentence is high, so, they are placed above the complementation continuum. beside manipulation verbs, modality verbs with the same bonds are placed in the category, then, below complementation continuum, perception-cognition-utterance verbs are placed afterwards which have the lowest bond between main clause and complement clause. While studying semantic factors dealing with complement clauses and main clauses, it is revealed that Persian doesnot use co-lexicalization joined with complement clauses. This research provides a continuum of complement-taking verbs in Persian and the effect of iconicity on linking these verbs.

This paper aims to investigate markedness in nominal and pronominal morphology of modern north-western Iranian languages from a diachronic perspective based on Hawkinʼs (2004) minimized forms principle. Based on this principle marked forms ocuupy the lowest and unmarked forms the highest position in performance-based hierarchies. Forms are ranked based on their frecuency in performance-based hierarchies. The reason that there exist these different frecuensies can be attributed to communicative reasons, complixity and different occurances of linguistic units in outside world. In this paper, we have shown that markedness changes in number and gender hierarchies are in line with minimized forms principle and its predictions in the investigated languages, but there are some exceptions in case hierarchy, which is not in line minimized forms predictions.