A Semantic Map of Possessive Pronominal Clitics in Pertensive Constructions of New Persian

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
Z. Etebari 1
A. Alizadeh 2
M. Naghzguy-Kohan 3
1 Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Linguistics, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
2 Professor, Department of Linguistics, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
3 Professor, Department of Linguistics, Bu Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
10.52547/LRR.13.6.10
Abstract
This article studies semantic development of pronominal clitics in adnominal possessive constructions of New Persian (NP), i.e. 10th to 20th centuries. Although the structure of Persian possessive constructions has received attention in the previous literature, their semantic development is poorly noted. Since clitical possessors in adnominal constructions are not observed before NP, the investigation of their development will be beneficiary to understand semantic development of possession. A historical corpus of 500,000 words from prose texts of this period is investigated from which 1952 examples including clitical possessors are extracted. According to Heine (1977), Nikiforidou (1991), Koptjevskaja Tamm (2002), and Lehmann (2002), 21 meaning relations for possessive constructions with clitical possessors are introduced and the frequencies of each relation in the corpus and per century are represented. The diachronic investigation shows that the meaning relations are not distributed equally in various centuries but demonstrate a transfer from more concrete to more abstract relations. The body part and kinship relations are the most frequent which together with ownership are introduced as basic meanings of possessive constructions. Based on the semantic extension map of genitive structures introduced by Nikiforidou (1991), a map of semantic development of the above mentioned constructions is depicted with modifications. Moreover, the study shows that the third person singular and then first singular pronominal clitics have the most frequent usage in the corpus. In addition to contributing to understanding of semantic development of possession, the findings also represent linguistic criteria for stylistic analysis and dating of NP manuscripts.

1. Introduction

This article studies semantic development of pronominal clitics (PCs) as possessors of pertensive constructions in New Persian (NP). The structure of the adnominal possessive constructions in this language is pertensive, not genitive, since it is the head of the construction, the possessee, that is either marked by an ezafeh particle followed by a nominal or pronominal possessor, or marked by a clitical possessor. Since clitical possessors in adnominal constructions are not observed before NP, the investigation of their development during NP will be beneficiary to understand semantic development of possession.



2. Literature Review

In the previous literature, there are many studies trying to categorize different meaning relations represented by possessive constructions. However, there have been disagreements on which possessive relations depict basic meaning of possession and how different meanings are related to or derived from each other. Some consider ownership as basic meaning but others show that whole-part and/or kinship are more basic. Nikiforidou (1991) discusses that various meanings are derived based on metaphoric mapping and by studying European languages introduces a map of semantic extention for genitive structures which will be an starting point in our analysis.



3. Methodology

Since the study is diachronic, the data are of written type and only the prose texts of NP period, 10th to 20th centuries, are studied. From each century, three manuscripts with different authors are selected. The corpus consists of about 500000 words, including 15000 words per manuscript, from which 1952 adnominal possessive constructions including clitical possessors are extracted. Their semantic relations are represented based on the descriptions in Heine (1977), Nikiforidou (1991), Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2002) and Lehmann (2002). The frequencies of the semantic relations per century in addition to their growth are demonstrated and a semantic map of their development is depicted based on the semantic extension map of genitive structures introduced by Nikiforidou (1991), but with modifications.



4. Results

The analyses show that the most frequent relations encoded by the possessive PCs in the whole corpus and per century are body-part and kinship relations, with 60% of the sample in total. The ownership relation includes only 5% of the data. All semantic relations show increase of usage through centuries and some are rare or recent. Figure (1) demonstrates frequencies of different semantic relations in total.



Figure 1.

Frequency of semantic relations in possessive constructions with clitical possessor





Moreover, a transfer from more concrete to more abstract concepts to be included in possessive relations is detected. This is more observable for the whole-part relation where the more abstract concepts of partitivity or quantification are not used sooner than 15th century (Fig 2).



Figure 2

Varieties of semantic relations with frequencies in whole-part constructions



This issue is also supported with the data showing that the 3sg PC has the most frequent usage, 70%, in the corpus and covers the most variety of the semantic relations. Figure 3 depicts frequencies of different person and number freatures of the PCs.

Keywords

Subjects

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Language Related Research
Volume 13, Issue 6 - Serial Number 72
January and February 2022
Pages 289-323