The future of ‘future’
A Persian perspective on grammaticalization of future marking
Bybee et al. (1994) claimed that
grammatical-types like past and future have similar paths of development
cross-linguistically. Following another line of research,
Poplack (2011),
Poplack and Tagliamonte (2000) and
Walker et al. (2004) explored the
grammaticalization of periphrastic ‘go-future’ in English, French, and Spanish
from a variationist perspective and have come to the same conclusion. In this
study we explore whether a new Persian future marker, MI_KHA: ‘want/will/going
to’, which is gaining ground in this language, can be an instance of the
grammatical-types mentioned above, and follows the same path of variation and
change as that of English and French. Eight-hundred and one future-referring
utterances were collected from natural conversations among Persian native
speakers and subjected to variable rule analysis to discover the factors
conditioning their use and variation. The findings suggest that the Persian
MI_KHA: is not only conditioned by linguistic factors, it also most likely
follows a path of development similar to English and French.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Future marking in Persian
-
2.1Syntax of KHA:STAN (to want/will)
- 2.2Why a desire verb and not a motion verb?
- 3.The grammaticalization of periphrastic future in English and French
-
4.Data and the variable context
- 4.1Factor groups and factors
- 4.1.1Animacy and grammatical person of the subject
- 4.1.2Type of the clause
- 4.1.3Temporal distance
- 4.1.4Sentence polarity
- 4.1.5Temporal adverbials
- 5.Analysis and results
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
- Notes
-
References