This paper focuses on the long-term grammaticalization of tense/aspect systems in the West Iranian languages, beginning with Old Iranian (Section 1). In Middle Persian (Section 2) the Aorist and the reduplicative Perfect of Old Persian were replaced by a new system of analytic constructions. The… read more
The present article contributes to the current theoretical discussions regarding the issues of grammaticalization, degrammati(calizati)on and reanalysis as practiced by scholars working predominantly in West European, Greek and Slavic languages. It brings into discussion relatively… read more
I will argue that the Late Middle Indo-Aryan period (7–11th c.) was the crucial period for the establishment of ergative alignment as known from contemporary West Indo-Aryan languages (Bubenik 1998). I will demonstrate that the syncretism of case leading to the appearance of the absolutive case in… read more
In this paper I will attempt to reconstruct the (Late) PIE syntax of experiential constructions for three classes of verbs: in (1) and (2) for verbs of cognition and perception, in (3) verbs denoting changes in bodily states, and in (4) verbs of deontic and epistemic modality. In (5) I will make… read more
The unique documentation of the Iranian family of languages provides a rare opportunity to study the development of a verbal system over the span of several millennia. We argue that the rise of the Early New Persian aspectual type was a consequence of the loss of ergative typology, examining the… read more
SUMMARY The Theory of Functional Grammar (S. C. Dik 1989) does not recognize explicitly the INFLECTIONAL type in addition to the FREE PRONOUN, CLITIC and APPOSITIONAL types. On the basis of data from a number of IE and non-IE languages, this paper presents cogent evidence for its recognition. It is… read more
SUMMARY This paper investigates three problems related to the phenomenon of split ergativity in several Indo-Iranian languages. (1) In ergative tenses Pashto and Kashmiri belong to the canonical ergative-absolutive type — irrespective of the definiteness of the nominal P(atient) — while Sindhî and… read more