The Grammaticalization of the Indefinite Article in Old Persian:A Construction Grammar Account

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
M. Meshkinfam 1
M. Naghzguy-Kohan 2
1 PhD in linguistics, linguistics, humanities, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
2 Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, humanities, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
10.29252/LRR.12.4.2
Abstract
This paper identifies the grammatical constructions expressing indefiniteness in Old Persian. Based on the extant data from this stage of Persian language, There had been no indefinite article before Old Persian era and its grammaticalization is the result of the bridging context 'There is only one X, the X represents a human being'. In fact, the metonymic relations triggered reanalysis of "aiva" 'one' to an 'indefinite article' which in turn paved the way for its metaphoric extension. To explain this path of development, a Construction Grammar model is adopted. This research is based on the corpus of OP gathered by Kent (1953). The investigation illustrates that the token frequency of the aforementioned indefinite article in the total NPs (4130) amounts to 0.5%. This percentage is not much high; however, it implies that it is a newly formed grammatical construction in Old Persian. In other words, it illustrates the early stages of the indefinite article grammaticalization.



1. Introduction

The terms "Definiteness" and "Indefiniteness" are usually applied to noun phrases (for example Abbott, 2004; 2006) and encoded using different linguistic means. The most common diachronic source for the indefinite marker in the languages of the world is the numeral 'one' (Givón, 1981; Lyons, 1999; Heine & Kuteva, 2002).

Only a minority of the languages of the world have grammaticalized indefinite markers (Heine, 1997:68). In other words, languages of the world tend to grammaticalize the "definite marker" prior to the "indefinite" one (Moravcsik, 1969; Croft, 2003). In Moravcsik's (1969) sample of 108 languages, in 61 languages (56%) only definite markers were identified, whereas 5 languages (5%) contained only indefinite markers and there was no information on the existence of the definite ones; Those 5 languages are Bambara, Gipsy, Rotuman, Sundanese, and Aztec. As a result Persian deserves studying in this regard. In this research, it is investigated whether the indefinite article existed in Old Persian grammar. If the response to this question is positive, the mechanism of its grammaticalization will be investigated. The data of this research are extracted from the corpus gathered by Kent (1953).



2. Literature Review

The most related work in the related literature is the work of Paul (2008). Paul describes indefiniteness marking in three stages established for Persian language. His findings are represented as follows (figure 1) (Paul, 2008:310):






Keywords

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Language Related Research
Volume 12, Issue 4 - Serial Number 64
September and October 2021
Pages 33-71