نامه فرهنگستان
سال بیست و دوم شماره 3 (پاییز 1402)

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.

More than 150 years have passed since the compilation of dastur-e sokhxan (1289 AH) by Mirzā Habib e Esfahāni, which is generally considered the first orderly and modern grammar of the Persian language. Since then, various Persian grammars have been compiled. Grammars are often divided into types, including "traditional grammars", "prescriptive grammars", "descriptive grammars", "comprehensive grammars", "pedagogical grammars" and "scientific grammars". In this article, based on linguistic criteria, we present a new classification for Persian grammars: 1) non-linguistic grammars, 2) linguistic grammars which include two subtypes: a) non-theory-driven, and b) theory-driven grammars. The characteristics of seven grammars have been evaluated by such criteria as: 1) definition of language and its components, 2) definition of grammar and its levels, 3)  its assumptions, 4) its goals 5) its methodology, 6) level of descriptiveness of grammar, 7) levels of adequacy of grammar , 8) types of explanations, 9) the adaptation of general linguistics, and 10) its theoretical orientation. The results of the study show that the theory-driven grammars are more descriptive and explanatory than the previous ones. The chronology of the evolution of the concepts and innovations of the science of linguistics in the western world and its adaptation to the emergence of grammar types in the Persian language confirms the idea that the advances of theoretical linguistics over time have a significant effect on the nature of Persian grammars.

Generally, when the foreign words are adapted from another language, their meaning or form changes in the borrowing language depending on how the native language deals with the borrowed words. This general rule is true for Arabic words adapted in Persian language such as Arabic broken plurals. Persian speakers have considered these Arabic broken plurals as singular. The main aim in this research is to understand the reason for this singularity assuming of broken plurals and to assess whether broken plurals were assumed as singular in different times of past centuries or not?In this article, we have investigated the use of broken plurals by evaluating multiple texts of various types of poetry, prose, translation and composition and we have shown that teaching the Arabic language and familiarity with Arabic texts assisted the decreasing use of broken plural words as singular nouns. The scope of these applications has been limited to words that the native Persian-speakers have not recognized their new meaning.

Denominal and deadjectival verbs, or fake verbs in other words, are verbs that are made from nouns or adjectives. Investigations show that the construction of simple verbs from nouns or adjectives has existed in the Persian language from the past until now, and various reasons, including the opposition of some writers, grammarians and editors to the construction and use of these verbs, have caused these verbs to rarely appear in the written language. As a result, the Persian language does not benefit from this possibility as it should. In this article, the history of the construction of these verbs and their number in three varieties of Classical Persian, Standard Persian, and Spoken Persian have been examined, and it has been briefly determined that out of a total of 280 old and abandoned simple verbs, 194 are denominal and deadjectival verbs. Out of 220 standard Persian verbs, 48 are denominal and deadjectival verbs, and out of 67 common Persian verbs, 60 are denominal and deadjectival verbs. In other words, out of a total of 567 simple verbs in the Persian language, 302 are denominal and deadjectival verbs. Therefore, despite the opinion of some researchers, more than half of the verbs in the Persian language are denominal and deadjectival. In this article, the most important problems in the construction and use of these verbs have been answered, and it has been shown that the process of making verbs from nouns or adjectives has never died and is still active today.

The postposition “rā” is syntactically an accusative case marker in the Persian language. Accompanying the case marker “rā” with the direct object is mandatory for some verbs, but in other cases, transitivity defines the presence or absence of “rā”. According to Hopper and Thompson (1980), transitivity is considered a continuous concept and is a feature of the clause (and not only a feature of the verb). Then, in addition to the verbs, the subject and object in a sentence also play a role in transitivity. Accordingly, if the object of an active verb is a proper noun, human (animate), objective or singular, and countable and referable noun, the clause is more transitive. This research studies the postposition “rā” in Persian based on Hopper and Thompson. We assume that there should be a relationship between the presence of “rā” and the transitivity of the clause. To investigate this hypothesis, we used the “Persian dependency treebank” (Rasouli et al., 2013). This corpus contains about half a million words and thirty thousand sentences. There are twenty thousand objects in this corpus. The findings showed that the inanimate singular nominal objects are the most frequent object accompanied with “rā”, and definite nouns and object pronouns tend to be associated with “rā” more than indefinite nouns.

During the history of the Persian language, many words have undergone different changes, among these changes is the appearance of the consonant /d/ after the consonant /r/ in some words. This phenomenon happened due to the close place of articulation of these two consonants. This change has been seen in the Khorāsān, Transoxiana, Sistān, and central cities from the fourth century onwards. Another change that is also the topic of this article’s discussion is the elimination of /d/ after the consonant /r/. The consonant /r/ causes /d/ to be eliminated due to the closeness of its place of articulation to the place of articulation of /d/ and for ease of pronunciation. This change also happened in the Khorāsān, Transoxiana, and central cities from the 4th century onwards. Both changes are seen in words with different grammatical identities.

By publishing dasture-sokhan, Habib-e Esfahāni compiled the first independent grammar teaching textbook in 1289 AH. Other autors kept on composing Persian grammar teaching textbooks based on French and Arabic Grammars. In this article some Persian grammar textbooks taught in Iran schools (from 1298 to 1357) were studied. General feautures of the books of this period and their discussed grammatical issues were analysed. We concluded that most of the grammar textbooks were influenced by Arabic grammars. Although the writers had their own approach in compiling a book, at the same time they were affected by previous or contemporary authors. Therefore, only a few books had their own distinct method, and most of the books followed a similar approach. The grammar textbooks written by Gharib, Panj Ostād, Khānlari, Anvari and Ahmadi Givi, Sādeghi and Arzhang were the pioneer books of that period.