Description and analysis of the pronoun clitics of past verb phrase in the Se-Qal’a dialect based on Optimality Theory

The purpose of this study is describe and analyze the clitics of past verb phrase based on Optimality Theory in the Se-Qal’a dialect. Se-Qal’a dialect is one of the ancient dialects of Persian language located in Sarayan city of South Khorasan. The method used in this research is descriptive and analytical. For this purpose, 10 male, elderly and illiterate speakers were randomly selected and linguistic data were collected by using speech recordings. Then, the collected data were extracted from recorded sentences and transcribed based on international phonetic alphabet system, and the types of past tense verbs in this dialect were classified, described and their clitics were determined. After that, the constraints used in the linguistic structure were extracted based on the constraints proposed by Anderson (1994) to determine the clitics. Finally, the extracted constraints were analyzed in special tables of Optimality Theory. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that in all types of past verbs, except for the subjunctive past verb, the Leftmost(cli) constraint is unrivaled, although in the compound past tense, the ranking of the constraints is different with simple past. In the past participle, in order to determine the optimal position of the clitic, the NonInitial(cli) constraint has the highest rank and its violation is fatal. Therefore, the competition between the constraints in this dialect shows that the clitics for selecting the host in past participle use all three positions, which shows the flexibility of this dialect in determining clitics in past tense verbs.