A Semantic Map of Possessive Pronominal Clitics in Pertensive Constructions of New Persian

This article studies semantic development of pronominal clitics in adnominal possessive constructions of New Persian (NP), i.e. 10th to 20th centuries. Although the structure of Persian possessive constructions has received attention in the previous literature, their semantic development is poorly noted. Since clitical possessors in adnominal constructions are not observed before NP, the investigation of their development will be beneficiary to understand semantic development of possession. A historical corpus of 500,000 words from prose texts of this period is investigated from which 1952 examples including clitical possessors are extracted. According to Heine (1977), Nikiforidou (1991), Koptjevskaja Tamm (2002), and Lehmann (2002), 21 meaning relations for possessive constructions with clitical possessors are introduced and the frequencies of each relation in the corpus and per century are represented. The diachronic investigation shows that the meaning relations are not distributed equally in various centuries but demonstrate a transfer from more concrete to more abstract relations. The body part and kinship relations are the most frequent which together with ownership are introduced as basic meanings of possessive constructions. Based on the semantic extension map of genitive structures introduced by Nikiforidou (1991), a map of semantic development of the above mentioned constructions is depicted with modifications. Moreover, the study shows that the third person singular and then first singular pronominal clitics have the most frequent usage in the corpus. In addition to contributing to understanding of semantic development of possession, the findings also represent linguistic criteria for stylistic analysis and dating of NP manuscripts.