Disclosure Discourse Markers in Persian: A Grammaticalization Account

According to Heine (2013), the main function of discourse markers is to relate our speech and the situation of discourse (i.e. the speaker-hearer interaction), to explain the speaker’s ideas, and organize the text. They are syntactically independent from the syntactic environment of the sentence. Since these markers, as particular tools of language usage and transferring messages, have a significant role in social communication, they make a part of sociolinguistic studies. This paper focuses on a group of Persian discourse markers which have mostly a fixed and certain syntactic structure (such as “The truth is that…”). We call these expressions “Disclosure” discourse markers due to their function in preparing the process of conversation and the addressee for revealing the truths. The research data were gathered from today’s Persian written texts and also Persian speakers speech. The theoretical framework consists of cognitive grammar and Aijmer’s (2007) grammaticalization models. Data analysis indicates that disclosure discourse markers represent a grammaticalized picture of the matrix clause in Persian because they no more carry the main concept of the sentence. This picture reinforces the necessity of reviewing the syntactic concepts of the matrix and subordinate clauses by considering the presence of discoursal elements in the sentence.