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Article published In:
Asia-Pacific Language Variation
Vol. 3:2 (2017) ► pp.130–159

The future of ‘future’

A Persian perspective on grammaticalization of future marking

| University of Tarbiat Modares | University of Montana
| Syracuse University

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.

Keywords: grammaticalization, future marking, Persian, universal path, variationist analysis
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
Published online: 19 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.16011.gha
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