Effects of person and number hierarchies on development of personal reflexive pronouns in New Persian

This article studies the diachronic development of reflexive pronouns derived from xod in New Persian, i.e. 10th to 20th centuries. Not in all centuries of New Persian one can find the indexation of xod by pronominal clitics and it is mostly believed that the indexation is a characteristic of colloquial Persian. The current study, employing a typological perspective, tries to investigate the sequence of the emergence as well as the development process of the reflexive pronouns with different persons and numbers in New Persian. We assume that the process follows the universal referential hierarchies.In Persian, similar to for example English, Turkish and Finnish, one and a same set of reflexive pronouns show both reflexive and emphatic functions. The reflexive pronoun xod in New Persian is derived from xwad in Middle Persian with adverbial function (Mackenzie, 2011), and xwad is a development from the prefix uva with possessive meaning in Old Persian (Kent, 1950). New Persian uses xod as both emphatic and reflexive pronouns. Moyne (1971) considers possessive function of xod as emphatic. However, Davari (2016) points out that the use of xod as a possessor is to denote reflexive function and based on this concludes that the reflexive uses of xod in Persian precede the emphatic uses.Regarding person and number indexations of different grammatical categories, different hierarchies are introduced (Greenberg, 1966; Comrie, 1989, 1999; Woolford, 1999; Corbett, 2000; Croft, 2003). In some hierarchies (according to certain languages), animacy plays a bigger role, dominating first and second persons over third person. However, for some languages, animacy is indifferent and they follow the hierarchy with the domination of third person. Furthermore, specifically for the presence of reflexive markers with different persons among languages, Comrie (1989; 1999) introduces the hierarchy that dominates third person over first and second persons, and Faltz (1985) believes that second person also dominates first person in reflexive pronouns.This study aims to determine what referential hierarchies play role in the emergence and development of the reflexive pronoun xod into personal reflexive pronouns xodam, xodat, xodaš, xodemān, xodetān, and xodešān. It also takes a brief look at the influence of different functions of xod in the process.

Since the study is diachronic, the given data at first place are of written type and only the prose of this period is investigated. Among various available texts, three manuscripts are selected per century, in total 33 texts. The criteria of the selections are the simplicity of the language of the texts, the narrativity of the texts, and the certainty on the dates they were written. From each text, 15000 words are compiled which resulted in a half a million word corpus[1]. The corpus includes 192 constructions where the reflexive pronoun xod is used with one of the pronominal clitics. The current article takes a diachronic typological approach and regarding the frequencies of the personal reflexive pronouns in different centuries of New Persian, investigates the influence of different referential hierarchies (Greenberg, 1966; Faltz, 1985; Comrie, 1989a, 1989b Comrie, 1989, 1999; Woolford, 1999; Corbett, 2000; Croft, 2003), on their development. It also takes a look at the role of the emphatic and reflexive functions in the developments.

According to the corpus, the first uses of personal clitic pronouns attached to xod belong to the third person singular and are not older that 14th or 15th centuries (8th or 9th in Hijri calendar). The third person singular reflexive pronoun xodaš, in both sequence of emergence and frequency in different centuries, overtly dominates the first and second reflexive pronouns. As illustrated in figure 1, first person also dominates the second person and singular is placed over plural in the hierarchy of number. Furthermore, according to the figure 2, the first cases of personal reflexive pronouns are used in the corpus in possessive constructions. Then emphatic function and later reflexive function are observed.