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Part of
Advances in Iranian Linguistics II
Edited by Simin Karimi, Narges Nematollahi, Roya Kabiri and Jian Gang Ngui
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 361] 2023
► pp. 100–129

Chapter 4
Middle Persian Ezafe

| University of California, Los Angeles
| Stony Brook University
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.
Keywords: Ezafe, historical emergence, Old Persian, reanalysis, case, prepositions, case assigning Ps, nominal Ps, Ezafe Constituency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The historical emergence of Ezafe
    • 2.1Old Persian and transition
    • 2.2The genesis of Ezafe in Middle Persian
  • 3.The distribution of Ezafe in Middle Persian
    • 3.1Ezafe in the Middle Persian NP
      • 3.1.1Nouns and nominal complement [NP N ez NP]
      • 3.1.2Noun and adjectival modifier [NP N ez AP*]
      • 3.1.3Noun, adjectival modifier and noun complement [NP N ez AP ez NP]
      • 3.1.4Noun and prepositional phrase [NP N ez PP]
      • 3.1.5Noun and relative clause [NP N ez CP]
    • 3.2Ezafe in the Middle Persian PP
      • 3.2.1Subgroup 1 [PP P NP]
      • 3.2.2Subgroup 2 [PP P ez NP]
  • 4.The grammatical status of Middle Persian Ezafe
    • 4.1Middle Persian Ezafe is a free morpheme
    • 4.2Middle Persian Ezafe constituency
    • 4.3The category of Middle Persian Ezafe
  • 5.Questions for future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 14 April 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.361.04sam
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