“be-” Becoming Obligatory in Complex and Prefixal Verbs: An Ongoing Change in the Mood System of Contemporary Persian

This paper aims to investigate the usage pattern of “be-” with complex and prefixal predicates in present subjunctive mood and imperative mood. Our corpus and the statistics come from linguistic judgements passed by 12 Persian speakers about the presence or absence of “be-” with complex and prefixal predicates, and the speakers entered their usage priorities in the questionnaires (31,548 tokens for 3,588 types of complex and prefixal predicates, altogether). The research findings show that the degree of obligatoriness of “be-” with prefixal predicates is generally lower than complex predicates, and that the highest proportion of optional appearance of “be-” among complex predicates belongs to “kardan” and “shodan” as light verbs. In addition, among non-verbal elements, the highest statistics of obligatoriness go to the categories of adverb and prepositional phrase, and the lowest to the adjective. The authors believe that the variation in the use of “be-” observed for some light verbs and non-verbal categories, as well as the very high level of its obligatoriness for some complex and prefixal predicates, and its almost complete obligatory status for simple verbs, all indicate an ongoing change in the mood system of Contemporary Persian. The future of linguistic changes cannot be easily predicted, but it is probable that the optional uses of “be-” become obligatory gradually, and even some unpermitted instances gradually become optional, and ultimately obligatory.