The Modal Particle "-ā", a New Member of Modal Elements in Persian Language

Document Type : Research

Author

Linguistics, Humanities, PNU University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Modal particles and discourse markers are both subsumable under the broad category of pragmatic markers. While discourse markers concern the structure or form of discourse, have no effect on propositional content and occur freely in different positions of the sentence, modal particles are highly content-dependent, have a fixed scope, are subject to heavy syntactic restrictions and most of all, introduce subjective notions. The element "-ā" is one of the active modal particles in Persian that on the basis of Lyons' (1977) proposed framework of modals and through a basic descriptive research, is brought under investigation to find out its notions and functions. The gathered data belong to colloquial style and are collected in informal situations from the casual conversations among ordinary speakers. The study reveals that this modal particle introduces a wide range of deontic and epistemic modal concepts like command, request, warning, threat, objection, sarcasm and complaint, predicting unfavorable circumstances and prohibition, and assessing a situation with astonishment. In all of these diverse concepts, the epistemic and deontic commitment of the speaker is illuminant; therefore these modal concepts are considered as speaker-oriented or subjective. The functional scope of the element "-ā" is neither the verb nor the sentence, but the whole utterance, therefore it occurs at the end of the utterance. It is also heavily context-dependent. Regarding the above facts, the element "-ā" is considered as a modal particle that fall in the category of modal elements of Persian language.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics