A Diachronic Study on the Development of the Persian Discourse Marker “ya’ni”Based on Heine’s Pragmaticalization Framework (2013)

The present research studies a process involved in the rise of the Persian discourse marker “ya’ni” (meaning that) in the framework of discourse grammar (Kaltenbock et al, 2011) and based on Heine’s approach (2013). Heine believes that the process leading to the rise of discourse markers is pragmaticalization. To him, a process called co-optation is the central mechanism involved in pragmaticalization, and he considers pragmaticalization and grammaticalization as distinct processes. Through co-optation a linguistic unit is transferred from sentence grammar to thetical grammar, acquires new semantic functions based on the complicated network of situation of discourse, and changes to a discourse marker. To carry out the present study based on Heine’s approach as its analytical framework, diachronic data in Persian were collected from the 4th to 14th Hijri centuries by choosing two typical books from each century. Then, all the occurrences of “ya’ni” in those books were manually identified and analyzed. The present diachronic study of “ya’ni” in Persian confirms Heine’s framework, and it shows a growing number of theticals as time passes. In addition, it was verified that the process which plays a role in the development of “ya’ni” is not grammaticalization, but pragmaticalization in center of which there is co-optation.