The Evolution of Morphological and Syntactic Causative Constructions in Modern Persian: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Our purpose in this article is to investigate the formal mechanisms of causative constructions of Modern Persian language based on Dixon (2012) typology. In this diachronic study, a corpus of more than 330000 words and 4151 causative constructions extracted from 30 books of 4th to 7th and 13th and 14th AH centuries. The analysis of Persian causative constructions shows that this language uses three known lexical, morphological, and syntactic mechanisms in order to express the causative meaning so that lexical mechanism has the highest occurrence frequency among them. The data shows that syntactic causative application is restricted to the recent centuries so that no construction of this type has been found in early centuries. Our findings also prove that 4th century has the most frequency of causatives and we can see a decreasing rate of these constructions so that 13th century has the lowest position and again we observe an increasing rate in the current century. The results also indicate that morphological causatives have had a decreasing frequency so that some verbs like "faramushandan", "shanavandan", "agahandan" and… have been omitted from speakers’ vocabulary. Another result is that although existence of a causative verb is necessary for a construction to be regarded as a causative, it is not enough.

Keywords

• causative constructions
• syntactic causative
• morphological causative
• lexical causative
• corpus-based linguistics