A New Glance at the Third Person Singular Pronoun Enclitic (aš/eš) in Colloquial Persian based on Functional Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Faeqe Ebrahim Poornik ¹
• Aliyeh Kord Zafaranlu Kambuziya ²
• Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam ³

¹ PhD Candidate in Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

² Associate Professor in Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

³ Professor in Linguistics, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran

10.22067/jlkd.2024.83887.1185

Abstract

This research tried to investigate a specific case of pronominal enclitic (eš/aš) in colloquial Persian based on functional approach. Two novels including a total of 56,500 words and the data on the internet were used as corpus. A corpus of 110 sentences with the desired structure were extracted. The investigation revealed that the reference of pronominal enclitic is the common and assumed knowledge of interlocutors which might be represented as a proposition in the discourse or activated by an element in the language. The pronominal enclitic is structurally a presupposition trigger and adjuncts (rastaš, haqiqataš, vaqeiataš) are discourse markers. The reference enclitic holds old information and is a specified definite. The predicate following enclitic holds new information and is a specified indefinite. This predicate contains focal information. The third person singular enclitic appears both as an adjunct and as a clause at the beginning of the sentence and can be omitted. Their semantic and pragmatic function is truth assertion.

Keywords

• Pronominal Enclitic
• Information Structure
• Definiteness
• Functionalism
• Colloquial Persian

Main Subjects

• Linguistics

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