نامه فرهنگستان
سال هفدهم شماره 1 (پاییز 1397)

Aspect isn’t considered as a grammatical category in any of Dari Persian grammar books. P. Natel Khanlari was the first grammarian who introduced it to Persian grammar, describing the properties of verbs in the ancient Persian. Although. Khanlari’s works have been one of the most important sources of Afghan grammarians in recent decades, aspect hasn’t been discussed in Dari Persian grammar books. Afghan grammarians don’t make any distinctions between Aspect and Tense. Aspect is considered a structural and semantic feature of verbs. This article is an attempt to explore and explain grammatical and semantic features of imperfective aspect in Dari Persian language. In this essay first, present continuous is reviewed in Dari Persian grammar books and then continued with a descriptive approach to imperfective aspect. This research displays, in Dari Persian the indication of prefix “mi” on continuity concept is weak. Adverbs or other Constituents are used in the sentence to indicate continuity meaning. The Prefix “mi”, in addition to continuation, expresses concepts such as incomplete, iterative, and habitual. Expression of continuous aspect is different in the dialects of Afghanistan and this article is based on the Persian dialect of Kabul.

The translation of Zakhirat al-Âkherat Prayers is likely to be written in the 6th century AH or in the early 7th AH and is the oldest text of Persian translation of Shia Prayers. Rare, significant and worthy structural features of this work make it distinguishable from other works in Persian language. In this article, rare, significant and frequent structural features are studied and analyzed on the basis of statistical methods. In this study, instructions, methods and achievements of contemporary linguistics are used and evidence from Old Persian texts are mentioned, especially in the analysis of structural features. In the first part of this study, the most important structural features of the text are studied, including, significant frequency of the grammatical morpheme ‘mar’ without ‘râ’ as a preposition and the use of morpheme ‘foruz’ as a verbal suffix; these features stem from some historical, main and important changes in Persian language. In the second part of the article, other worthy and frequently used features of the book in syntax are analyzed. The third part of the article discusses the important morphological features of the work. The article concludes with the tables showing frequency of the rare and significant structural features of the text.

In Shāhnameh and some Persian texts, there is a particular type of complex prepositions. The occurrence of two consecutive prepositions preceding a complement follows the Following pattern: preposition + preposition+ complement. In previous studies, six consecutive prepositions of ba bar, bar be, dar andar, dar be and ze dar have been recognized. The main purpose of this Pattern is to emphasize and reinforce the meaning. There are examples of the use of two successive prepositions from the fifth century to the contemporary times in the texts and most evidence are from the preposition bar be used in Yaghma-ye Jandaqi’s poetry. The history of this pattern goes back to Pahlavi’s language and texts. This pattern needs to be taken into consideration in the editing of Persian literary texts.

The postposition -rā has never ceased to be enigmatic in linguistic investigations. It has been associated with various syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors by Iranian and non-Iranian researchers. In this paper, we aim to question a popular view in which the postposition is taken to be exclusively a secondary topic marker. Utilizing the formal representation of the Lambrechtian information structure theory within the Role and Reference Grammar framework, we demonstrate that the postposition is apt to occur with constituents of varied informational values, i.e. topicality, focality, and contrast, in different syntactically manipulated strings. It however becomes clear that the common denominator for the rā-marked constituents is the identifiability of their referents at discourse level.

All Persian linguists have considered two imperative structures, namely second person singular and plural, and some have also pointed out two other structures: third person (imperative), plural and singular. The imperative verb for speaker, that is first person singular and plural, is not recognized in reference linguistic books and there are no instances of it in texts. This article is meant to prove that first-person singular exists, and presents some of its instances in literary texts and spoken language. The phonetic form of this verb and another structure of imperative verb in second-person singular (present-imperative) are also discussed in the article.

This article intends to Present evidence from a number of classical Persian texts to show the occurrences of compounds such as Mærd-e Mærd-ane ‘manly’ used as adjective. The article has concentrated on the formation of this compound with the suffix -ane in the 4th – 6th C. A. H. Persian texts.

From the synthetic perfect form in Old Persian, to the analytic perfect in New Persian; the language has undergone many changes. In Old Persian, the perfect was formed by the reduplication of the first syllable of the root and in Middle Persian the ergative construction of the language led to an analytic form. In New Persian, a perfect stem is formed by the perfective stem and the suffix /e/ and the auxiliary verb budan (to be). This “be perfect” in New Persian has also experienced changes and the language has built an evidential form based on the perfect construction. In other words, evidentiality has been formed through the whole paradigm in all of the aspectual forms. This recent change in the language has been the topic of many discussions regarding the beginning point of this grammaticalization. In this article, we have considered the perfect as an aspectual characteristic of Persian which is in relation to the past and present tense. In relation to the present, it accepts the following readings: universal, experiential, resultative, and expressing hot news. In relation to the past tense we can name anterior, inferential and evidential as the perfect construction applications in Persian.

Nowadays, One of the signs of definiteness in Persian language is ‘=e’ which is added to the end of the noun or noun phrase, such as asb=e rā kharidam. All of the grammarians and the linguists believe that it is specific to spoken language, and the examples which they have mentioned belong to today’s spoken language and the oldest of them does not go farther than Sadeq Hedayat’s works. In this article, we have identified the oldest examples of the use of this construction in the poetic and prose texts in Persian literature of the sixth century A.H. and later. Then we have shown that there are examples in the poetry of the poets of Samarkand and Neyshabur, Suzani and Attar, those who lived in the sixth century A.H.

The recent exponential growth and development in communication technology are markedly influencing the forms of writing specially in social networks and instant messaging applications (IMs). These forms of writing do not follow formal norms and a certain fuzziness is observable in them. In order to understand changes in writing forms and patterns, this study made use of qualitative content analysis and as such it analyzed almost 6000 messages from four channels and one “group” in telegram instant messaging application: two entertainment and joke channels, two channels dedicated to formal information and news, and a family group. Analysis of the messages in this application demonstrates different patterns such as representation of verbal language in writing, various forms of abbreviating, wrong spellings, different styles of writing, which can be categorized into two groups. First, those patterns which do not have an equivalent in formal writing. Second, patterns which somehow represent verbal structures. This study shows that patterns of writing in these instant messaging applications are not merely a new style of writing, but many of them are strategic mechanisms to convey meaning and intonation, representing the verbal form in written language, maintaining language economy and also bypassing filtering systems. At the same time, findings show that these styles of writing are observed only in entertainment channels and family and friend groups, and formal channels in instant messaging applications follow the standard norms.