Progressive Aspect in Afghan Persian (Dari)

Aspect isn’t considered as a grammatical category in any of Dari Persian grammar books. P. Natel Khanlari was the first grammarian who introduced it to Persian grammar, describing the properties of verbs in the ancient Persian. Although. Khanlari’s works have been one of the most important sources of Afghan grammarians in recent decades, aspect hasn’t been discussed in Dari Persian grammar books. Afghan grammarians don’t make any distinctions between Aspect and Tense. Aspect is considered a structural and semantic feature of verbs. This article is an attempt to explore and explain grammatical and semantic features of imperfective aspect in Dari Persian language. In this essay first, present continuous is reviewed in Dari Persian grammar books and then continued with a descriptive approach to imperfective aspect. This research displays, in Dari Persian the indication of prefix “mi” on continuity concept is weak. Adverbs or other Constituents are used in the sentence to indicate continuity meaning. The Prefix “mi”, in addition to continuation, expresses concepts such as incomplete, iterative, and habitual. Expression of continuous aspect is different in the dialects of Afghanistan and this article is based on the Persian dialect of Kabul.