Formal and Substantive Idioms in Persian: The Case of “Agar (if)-Constructions”

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”.