Conditional connective words in New Persian

The purpose of this paper is investigating the conditional connective words in New Persian language based on the Declerck and Reed typology (2001). According to this semantic typology, different types of conditional sentences based on possible worlds of protasis are factual, neutral, closed, open, tentative and counterfactual. In the canonical conditional sentence there is one connective word in the beginning of the sentence that is used to mark conditionality. In the present study, we try to examine these types with respect to the corpus of 3648 conditional sentences extracted from 110 books of 4th to 14th AH centuries. In New Persian various connective words have been used as conditional words like: “agar, agarche, agarna, ta, ke, valo, farzan, haminke, darsuratike, vaella, hargah, chon, …”. Statistical calculations on conditional words with a frequency above fifty show that there are certain tendencies between different conditional possible worlds and types of conditional words.