A Discussion on the Pronoun-Constructed Verbs in Persian

There are some verbs in the early Persian texts in which instead of the normal verb endings, the enclitic personal pronouns are attached to the past stem; therefore they have been termed as ‘pronoun-constructed’ verbs by researchers of Persian grammar. The main usage of these verbs are optative or conditional and there are reliable evidence of 2nd person singular and plural and also 1st person plural. Although some suspicious evidence is available from other persons, one cannot be sure of their accuracy and relevance to these verbs. The only accepted explanation on the antecedent of these verbs is G. Lazard’s view that the existence of the pronoun in these constructions is related to some of the ergative verbs in Middle Persian in which instead of a pronoun preceding the past stem, the enclitic pronoun is attached to it. In this paper first the weakness of this view will be shown and then it is proposed that the enclitic pronoun has been attached through a reanalysis of the of the first person singular verbal ending as the first person enclitic pronoun. Such a reanalysis has also examples in Sogdian.