The Discourse Marker of “âxe” (‘because’/‘but’) in Persian: An Intersubjectification Account

This study investigates the functional complexity of the discourse marker “âxe” (‘because’/‘but’) in Persian to express causal relations from the perspective of (inter) subjectification. To this end, we have adopted a descriptive-analytic approach to conduct the research. The data of our investigation come from certain synchronic corpora of every day conversations found in the Persian weblogs, talk shows & interviews, as well as notes taken from every day talks. The findings indicate that “âxe” has undergone grammaticalization at both sentence and discourse levels, and it has reached the advanced stages of (inter) subjectification. In fact, in line with Sweetser (1990) and Degand and Fagard’s (2012) models, “âxe” expresses both objective and subjective causal relations. In fact, Persian speakers make use of this expression to express epistemic, speech act, and textual justification. These functions are indicative of increased dependency of “âxe” on discourse situation, showing the increased grammaticalization and (inter) subjectification it requires to materialize such discourse functions.