Statistical Evidence for Mood Functions of ‘be-’ in New Persian: A Diachronic Study

So far in the mood system of New Persian, the inflectional element ‘be-’ has had three grammatical roles: subjunctive marker, imperative marker, and future marker, all of which having in common the feature of unrealized occurrence of the event (as opposed to its realized occurrence for indicative mood). This investigation, based on a sampled corpus of 55 texts, selected from 10th to 20th centuries, follows the changes of these functions in New Persian diachronically. The results show that in a period of eleven centuries the frequency of ‘be-’ as a marker of subjunctive has increased three times, and as the imperative marker twice-and-half, while it has been productive in its third role (future marking) mostly in 10th to 12th centuries, and this function gradually disappeared later. Furthermore, since 19th c., ‘be-’ which was formerly used with simple verbs almost exclusively, began to be used with complex predicates as well. However, there is some amount of irregularity in the increasing frequency of ‘be-’ in the whole period, and the author attempts to explain it with such hypotheses as grammatical archaism in some texts, and the possible change of grammatical forms in the process of copying the texts