The history of the K-suffix -ū in Shirazi
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12559366 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maryam Nourzaei (University of Bamberg, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 589-626 |
| Publication date | 2022-12-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1356-1863 • E-ISSN: 1474-0591 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1356186322000323 |
| OpenAlex | W4311969529 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
This article investigates the use and frequency of what I refer to as the K-suffixes - ō /- ū/-o in the Shirazi dialects, namely, Old and Modern Shirazi. It shows that the use of K-suffixes as definiteness markers is more highly developed in Modern Shirazi than in Old Shirazi. In Old Shirazi, the K-suffix, with its original evaluative meaning, demonstrated some degree of multi-functionality. This has mostly been lost in Modern Shirazi, and the suffix is now used to express definiteness. The high frequency of use of the K-suffix appears to be independent of genre, speaker, and speech setting. Data from a corpus of written texts in Old Shirazi, mainly comprised of poems, are quantitatively analysed, along with data from a corpus of spoken Shirazi narratives and data from a questionnaire answered by ten speakers. The results show that an evaluative suffix can develop into a definiteness marker by passing through a stage of combination with deictic markers, which paves the way for extending the use of the K-suffix to include non-deictic anaphoric tracking. This article concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a pathway that is distinct from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definiteness marking, even if the endpoint may be similar. The detailed documentation of this process presented here is a further contribution to Iranian studies, and augments the small group of well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking cross-linguistically
Definiteness · Deixis · Demonstrative · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Naturalness · Particle physics · Physics · Suffix · Computer Science · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |