شواهدی آماری از نقش‌های وجهی «ب» در فارسی نو: مطالعه‌ای درزمانی

عنصر تصریفی «ب » در نظام وجه فارسی نو تاکنون سه نقش دستوری نشانۀ وجه التزامی، نشانۀ وجه امری و نشانۀ آینده را برعهده داشته ‌است که وجه اشتراک آن ها غیرقطعی بودن وقوع رویداد (درتقابل با گزارش وقوع قطعی رویداد در وجه اخباری) است. تحقیق حاضر که بر اساس پیکره ای متشکل از نمونه گیری از 55 اثر مکتوب در یک بازۀ یازده قرنی (قرن 4 تا 14 هجری) انجام گرفته ‌است، نشان می دهد که در طول این دوره، بسامد «ب » در نقش نشانۀ وجه التزامی سه برابر، و در نقش نشانۀ وجه امری دوونیم برابر شده‌ است، ولی نقش وجهی سوم (نشانۀ آینده) عمدتاً در قرن های 4 تا 6 فعال بوده و به تدریج متوقف شده ‌است. همچنین، به استناد داده های پیکره و آمارهای توصیفیِ ارائه شده در مقاله، از قرن 13 کاربرد «ب » که قبلاً تقریباً منحصر به افعال ساده بوده، به قلمرو افعال مرکب نیز گسترش یافته ‌است. ازسوی دیگر، بی نظمی هایی در آمارهای افزایش بسامد «ب » در پیکره در طول یازده قرن دیده می شود که نگارنده تلاش کرده ‌است با توسل به فرضیه هایی چون کهن گرایی دستوری در بعضی متون و تحریف احتمالی الگوهای دستوری در فرایند نسخه نویسی، آن ها را تحلیل کند. درمجموع، آمارها نشان می دهد که دستوری‌شدگی «ب » از قبل از قرن 4 آغاز شده بوده و در طول این یازده قرن ادامه یافته و در فارسی امروز نیز بسامد آن همچنان در دهه های اخیر در حال افزایش بوده ‌است.

Statistical Evidence for Mood Functions of ‘be-’ in New Persian: A Diachronic Study

So far in the mood system of New Persian, the inflectional element lsquo;be rsquo; has had three grammatical roles: subjunctive marker, imperative marker, and future marker, all of which having in common the feature of unrealized occurrence of the event (as opposed to its realized occurrence for indicative mood). This investigation, based on a sampled corpus of 55 texts, selected from 10th to 20th centuries, follows the changes of these functions in New Persian diachronically. The results show that in a period of eleven centuries the frequency of lsquo;be rsquo; as a marker of subjunctive has increased three times, and as the imperative marker twiceandhalf, while it has been productive in its third role (future marking) mostly in 10th to 12th centuries, and this function gradually disappeared later. Furthermore, since 19th c., lsquo;be rsquo; which was formerly used with simple verbs almost exclusively, began to be used with complex predicates as well. However, there is some amount of irregularity in the increasing frequency of lsquo;be rsquo; in the whole period, and the author attempts to explain it with such hypotheses as grammatical archaism in some texts, and the possible change of grammatical forms in the process of copying the texts1. IntroductionA precise survey into the gradual development of grammatical markers is to follow the changes in their frequency patterns statistically, relying on the number and percentage reports. This paper attempts to fulfil this task for the marker lsquo;be rsquo; in the mood system of New Persian (from 10th century onwards). The goal the research, then, is to show the grammaticalization path of the marker and its mood functions throughout the intended period up to the present time. A restriction of the research, however, is that the source of data has been limited to written texts, even for contemporary Persian. 2. Literature ReviewThe first distinction in the mood systems is that of indicative vs. imperative. This distinction is morphologically shown in Persian by imperative zero agreement marking (in the singular form) as opposed to overt marking of indicatives (for the same form), and also by the indicative lsquo;mi rsquo; as opposed to lsquo;be rsquo; that its emergence is discussed in this paper.The third distinctive form in the mood system of Persian is subjunctive which is controversial among grammarians, both in its definition and instances. Natal Khanlari (1986: 2/306339) includes in the category all present and past subjunctives as well as some forms suffixed with lsquo;i rsquo;, and excludes conditionals and optatives from the category. By contrast, Ahmadi Givi (2001) subcategorizes conditionals and optatives as subjunctive, to the exclusion of past forms with lsquo;i rsquo; as well as past progressives. On the other hand, Mazaheri et al. (2004) define the subjunctive category so broadly that it also includes forms such as lsquo;bay aelig;d mir aelig;ft rsquo; (he/she had to go) and lsquo; scaron;ay aelig;d r aelig;fte aelig;st rsquo; (he/she may have gone). 3. MethodologyThe corpus of this research includes 77 thousand verbs, extracted by the author from 55 texts from 10th to 20th centuries. To the sampling purpose, five texts from each century were selected, and then, two parts of each text were adopted randomly, each one amounting to 700 verbs (1400 verbs from each text, altogether). These verbs were labelled for tense, mood, and the structure of the verb (simple, prefixed, or complex), determining whether they had lsquo;be rsquo; for mood marking or not.This research follows the definition given for the subjunctive in Ahmadi Givi (2001), and the kinds of subjunctive included by Darzi and kwak (2015) and Ilkhanipour (2017). Accordingly, all instances of irrealis (including past progressives with lsquo;h aelig;mi/mi rsquo;, and past forms with lsquo;i rsquo;) were excluded from the statistics, and all of the semantic types of present subjunctive (probability, obligation, optative, conditional, etc.) were included. 4. ResultsThe results show a gradual increase in the imperative and subjunctive functions of lsquo;be rsquo;, while the future marking function is mostly active in 10th to 12th centuries, and disappears gradually afterwards. Also, as shown in Figure 1, the imperative marking function of lsquo;be rsquo; has always been, and still is, ahead of its subjunctive marking function. Figure 1Grammatical functions of lsquo;be rsquo; by century Furthermore, the results show an imbalance with regard to the morphological structure of the verb: the verbs taking lsquo;be rsquo; before 19th century were almost exclusively of a simple root. Simple positive verbs reach a rate of 80% and 98% for subjunctives and imperatives, respectively, in 20th century. Complex verbs, however, began to take lsquo;be rsquo; increasingly in the last two centuries (19th and 20th), reaching the average rate of 28% and 30% for subjunctives and imperatives, respectively, in the last two texts of the corpus. Prefixed verbs are still very low in their rate of taking the marker. 5. DiscussionThe first issue to be discussed here is that in the whole corpus there are no instances of lsquo;be rsquo; detached from the verb. This shows that from the very beginning of New Persian period, lsquo;be rsquo; is functioning as a bound morpheme, having started its grammaticalization process well before 10th century. The second observation in a holistic approach is that lsquo;be rsquo; in the territory of complex predicates is a relatively recent phenomenon, having increased since 19th century. This late development can be due to the competing nature of the elements that occupy the preverbal position (i.e. nonverbal elements, derivational prefixes, and other inflectional markers) which puts them in a complementary distributional relationship. Thirdly, the status of complex predicates in contemporary Persian can probably be explained with resort to the partial syntactic independence of nonverbal element which allows for the insertion of lsquo;be rsquo;. This can be compared to derivationally prefixed verbs for which the prefix resists lsquo;be rsquo; insertion, with some exceptions that can be signs of an emerging phenomenon. 6. ConclusionAccording to the statistics, lsquo;be rsquo; has been in a grammaticalization path in the whole New Persian period, being still expanding its territory in the past decades (i.e. increasing its frequency for nonsimple verbs). In other words, the generality and obligatoriness of lsquo;be rsquo; for its mood functions has been increasing in the whole period under discussion, and it is still making progress