Clitic Pronouns

This article studies semantic development of pronominal clitics as possessors of pertensive constructions in New Persian. The structure of the adnominal possessive constructions in this language is pertensive, not genitive, since it is the head of the construction, the possessed item, that is marked either with an ezafeh particle or a clitical possessor. One of the functions of Persian pronominal clitics is the possessive function and they are varied according to three person and two number features. In the present article, the semantic relations of the pertensive structures including pronominal clitics as their possessors are investigated. Since the study is diachronic, the data are of written type and only the prose texts of this period, 10th to 20th centuries, are studied. From each century, three manuscripts with different authors are selected. Three criteria determine the selection of the texts. First, the language used in the texts is simple, meaning that the speech figures or rhyme schemes that might affect the usage of various linguistic items are limited; second, the texts are narrative since in this genre, it is more probable to find various person features of pronominal clitics; and third, the dates when they are written are certain. The corpus consists of about 500000 words, including 15000 words per manuscript. From this amount, 1952 adnominal possessive constructions including clitical possessors are extracted. Their semantic relations are represented based on the descriptions in Heine (1977), Nikiforidou (1991), Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2002) and Lehmann (2002). The frequencies of the semantic relations per century in addition to their growth are demonstrated in tables and figures and a semantic map of their development is depicted based on the semantic extension map in genitive structures introduced by Nikiforidou (1991) but with modifications. The analysis shows that the most frequent relations encoded by the possessive pronominal clitics both in the whole corpus and in the data of each century are body-part and kinship relations, with 60% of the sample in total. The ownership relation includes only 5% of the data. The findings do not support the hypothesis that ownership or legal possession is the basic meaning in genitive (here pertensive) constructions. All semantic relations show increase of usage through centuries and some are rare or recent. Moreover a transfer from more concrete to more abstract concepts to be included in possessive relations is detected. This is more observable for the whole-part relation where the more abstract concepts of partitivity or quantification are not used sooner than 15th century. It is also showed that the non-pronominal functions of the third person singular pronominal clitic, named as contrastive-partitive and definite, are results of the semantic extensions and abstraction of the possessive constructions leading to the reanalysis of this pronominal clitic. This issue is also supported with the data showing that the third person singular pronominal clitic has the most frequent usage in the corpus, 70%, and covers the most variety of the semantic relations.