When past meets future in Persian: A construction grammar approach to futurity

ABSTRACT

In Persian, two of the verbal constructions used for expressing futurity – the Past Simple and the Future Simple – are built around the past form of the main verb. This paper seeks to demystify this connection between the past and the future by investigating how these past forms contribute to the expression of futurity and setting this within an overall analysis of the future constructions in this language. Based on the form of the main verb in 940 sentences with verbal future constructions, six constructions were identified and categorized into future-oriented past constructions (FPST), which include the Past Simple and the Future Simple, and future-oriented present constructions (FPRT), which include the Present Simple, the Present Progressive, the Present Subjunctive and the WANT construction. A construction grammar approach together with Reichenbach and neo-Reichenbach terminology was then utilized to distinguish the differing relations between tense, aspect, mood and speaker perspective, and assign syntactic-semantic maps in terms of features such as level of formality, perfectness, intended future, certainty and inner aspect (aktionsart) to each of the FPST and FPRT constructions. It is argued that the use of the past form of the main verb in the Past Simple and the Future Simple (FPST constructions) owes much to aspectual and ontological factors, with the past element indicating certainty, perfectness and a speaker perspective of looking back.

KEYWORDS:

• Construction grammar
• future constructions
• aktionsart
• future-oriented past
• future-oriented present
• Persian

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on the early versions of this paper and the editor for her detailed editing. I would like to thank Dr Mohammad Amouzadeh for his useful comments and Dr Farhad Moezzipour for sharing his historical data.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Persian Linguistic Database (http://pldb.ihcs.ac.ir/) or from the corresponding author, SHM, upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, Bergs (2010, p. 234) categorizes English future expressions into five groups : will, be going to, simple present, present progressive and be to.

2 The Past stem is made by deletion of the morpheme at the end of the infinitive, e.g. goft ‘said, told’ is made by deletion of the morpheme -æn at the end of goft-æn ‘to say, tell’.

3 Inner aspect is also referred to as aktionsart (Kangasmaa-Minn, 1984) and situation type (Smith, 1997).

4 Outer aspect is also referred to as viewpoint aspect by Smith (1997).

5 Glossing of examples is in accordance with the Leipzig Glossing Rules, http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php, with the addition of EZ ‘ezafe (a grammatical particle linking two words)’, IMP ‘imperfective’, IMPR ‘imperative’, Infl ‘inflection’, OM ‘object marker’, PRT ‘present’, PRTS ‘present stem’, PSTS ‘past stem’ and SUBJ ‘subjunctive’.

6 It should be noted that hæstæn/æstan are not present forms of the verb budæn ‘to be’ as its past stem is bud while its present stem is bovæd (see Appendix A) and, although both the past and present stems of budæn have the same orthographic form ‘بود’ or BVD, they are pronounced differently.

7 Taleghani (2008) regards the Future Simple in Persian as a serial verb construction since comparable with SVCs, it is mono-clausal. However, unlike SVCs, the auxiliary xɑstæn ‘will, want’ is never used in the past form:

Table

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S. Hamzeh Mousavi

S. Hamzeh Mousavi is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Shahrood University of Technology, Iran. His research interests include cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and anthropological linguistics. He has proposed ColloNet for investigating frame-based aspects of collocations and has published papers such as ‘Terms of address and fictive kinship politeness in Lori’ (Journal of Politeness Research) and ‘I hear the smell of roses: Semantic aspects of synaesthetic constructions in Persian’ (Review of Cognitive Linguistics).