The Tense of possible worlds in conditional constructions of Modern Persian

Conditional construction is a linguistic universal that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. The conditional sentence is a compound statement composed of two main and subordinate clauses namely apodosis and protasis respectively. Most languages use conditional connective words to mark this construction. In Persian, “agar” has the most frequency among the conditional connective words. Except this word, there are some other connective words that can be used as a conditional connective word such as “tâ, čonanče, vaGti, hargâh, be šarte inke, hattâ agar,…”. Regarding the importance of conditional construction, this study examines verb’s tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses of the conditional sentences in the contemporary Persian language based on the theoretical framework of Declerck and Reed (2001). Declerck and Reed (2001: 65-66) have proposed a kind of typology for the different types of possible worlds cross-linguistically. Possible world is a situation in which things and incidents exist or could exist. Whereas a real possible world is a situation in which things really exist, an unreal possible world is a situation in which they could exist.   Based on this typology, the   possible world of a  protasis clause can be factual or theoretical. In the case  the possible world is theoretical, it can be neutral or non-neutral. The non-neutral possible world itself is divided into closed, open, tentative and counterfactual worlds. The canonical pattern of tense system in languages of the world portrays a distinction between past and non-past or future and non-future tenses.  English and Persian use a dual distinction between past and non-past tenses. In this research, we aim to examine the  tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses based on the type of the possible worlds of  protasis clauses. In order to investigate the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses in the conditional sentences of Modern Persian, we selected 10 fiction books of the most famous contemporary Persian authors. Selecting approximately 5000 words and 25 pages of each book randomly, we extracted conditional sentences   through the sample. The corpus involving 50622 words and 254 pages, showed 286 conditional sentences. To derive the tense of the possible worlds, the type of the conditional construction of each conditional sentence was determined based on the theoretical framework of Declerck and Reed (2001) and the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses was analyzed using the statistical calculations. Finally, we examined the relationship between the type of the conditional construction and the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses. The present contribution presented an attempt to investigate the probability of occurrence of past and non-past tenses of the protasis and apodosis clauses separately with regard to the data and the use of computations and statistical analysis methods. The study identified that  the tense variation of protasis and apodosis clauses in Persian is fewer than the English cognates . It was also argued that Persian represents a strong tendency in applying clauses that the tense of protasis and apodosis is non-past to be of the “open” division. On the other hand, we demonstrated that there is a strong tendency for the tense of protasis and apodosis being in the past to be of  factual characteristics. The study concluded that as for the open conditionals, the speaker often uses conditional construction to portray a situation which, as yet, has not occurred or could later occurr. Therefore, the tense is often non-past. On the other hand, exploiting factual conditional, the speaker represents a situation believed in the truth of its occurrence. Therefore the past tense will serve to express the factive situation.  Examining the corpus of the present research, we concluded that Persian conditional sentences can be classified according to Declerck and Reed’s typology. It was further indicated that in Modern Persian, the types of conditional constructions address   factual, neutral, closed, open, tentative and counterfactual divisions. We also showed that the past and the non-past tense of the protasis clause were almost equal-with the non-past to be slightly more than the past- while in the apodosis clause, non-past tense was more than the past form. Furthermore, the study exhibited that there is a tendency between the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses and the conditional type in Modern Persian; however, the tendencies are not absolute and it is not possible to guess the type of conditional construction certainly based on the tense of the verbs. Investigating the relationship between the modal meanings of protasis and apodosis clauses and the type of conditional constructions will be performed in further studies.