Edited by Simin Karimi, Narges Nematollahi, Roya Kabiri and Jian Gang Ngui
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 361] 2023
► pp. 100–129
This chapter describes one phase of the historical development of the “Ezafe” morpheme, a significant feature of Western Iranian languages. Ezafe is argued to have arisen in Middle Persian (MP) by a reanalysis of the Old Persian relative pronoun ‘haya’ due to a preponderance of copula-less clauses. It is shown that the distribution of Ezafe in MP resembles that in its modern descendants, but differing in three key respects: (i) MP Ezafe is an independent morpheme, and not a clitic; (ii) it appears to form a constituent with its following phrase; and (iii) it patterns like a preposition in various respects. This distribution, coupled with its emergence in the period when the Old Persian case system was disappearing and core functional prepositions were coming into the language, strongly suggests that Ezafe had the status of a genitive preposition in MP comparable to English ‘of’. We conclude with some interesting questions for further research raised by these results.