A Form of Oath with Conditional Construction in Persian

In addition to the main construction of oath in which one swears to someone or something, it has another form in Persian language. This kind of oath is a conditional construction which, at its first part, is provided with the subject of oath and at the second part, with the act of oath. In this paper, using the "speech act" theory in John Austin's point of view as a theoretical basis and by mentioning examples of literary works as well as examples of slang register, we will specify the conditional construction of oath. The results of the present research show that the form of conditional oath, in comparison with the main form, bears more emphasis and thus is further used in occasions that the addresser tends to emphasize on the subject. 

Oath in Persian has always had a special syntactic construction that has changed over time. The basic complete construction of swearing consists of the following components:  *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)  In this construction, the ‘noun’ is what is sworn by. The ‘sentence’ is subject of the oath, i.e. what the oath is taken for, such as: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article) • ‘I swear by the dust of your feet that I wish to die at your feet’ Apart from the main form mentioned above, the expression of an oath in Persian represents another form through a conditional construction. In a conditional swearing, the subject of the oath (i.e. what the oath is taken for) is stated in the dependent clause, and the act of swearing (i.e. what the oath is taken by) is included in the main clause.   

John Austin’s theory of “speech acts” suggests that, in the human language system, the speech inherently represents the performance of an act. In other words, the expression of words in itself is the doing of the action. Austin calls such speech ‘speech act’, i.e. the speech that carries an action. He argues that when a speaker utters a sentence, three levels of speech acts occur simultaneously: Locutionary act, Illocutionary act, and Perlocutionary act. Locutionary act is the meaningful phrases and sentences that are expressed. In illocutionary act, the speaker expresses phrases and sentences to encode a specific meaning. In the perlocutionary act, the speaker influences the audience through the speech. Austin divides the second speech act, i.e. illocutionary act, into five categories: 1. Verdictive: Acts that emphasize the speaker’s commitment to the truth of a proposition, such as ‘express’ and ‘estimate’ verbs. 2. Exercitive: Acts that indicate the exercise of power, right, sovereignty, will and influence and are expressed through such verbs as ‘choose’, ‘advise’, ‘order’, ‘appoint’ and ‘plead’ . 3. Commissive: Acts that indicate the speaker’s commitment to do something and, by expressing them, the speaker obliges oneself to do things. The verbs ‘promise’, ‘commit’ and ‘swear’ fall into this category. 4. Behabitive: Acts that show the types of social behaviors of language speakers, such as the verbs‘apologize’, ‘thank’, ‘sympathize’, ‘insult’, ‘humiliate’, etc. 5. Expositive: Acts that deal with how words are used in language and describe how speech is organized in the conversational process. This type of act includes the following verbs: ‘Argue’, ‘answer’, ‘assume’, ‘accept’ and ‘explain’. Taking of an oath or oath, which is the subject of this inquiry, belongs to the category of commissive acts in which the speaker takes an oath to express their commitment to an issue. Thus, from the point of view of the theory of speech acts, ‘swearing’ is an act that the speaker does with speech. The pragmatics and semantics of the syntactic construction in question confirm that although the form of speech is conditional, it is used for a certain act, which is the expression of an oath.

In this article, the nature and the status of the conditional construction of oath is examined with examples of classical and contemporary Persian literary works. To do this, with a comprehensive plan and a practical approach, we will examine the conditional construction of oath to understand how the components of this syntactic construction may change to encode a different meaning at different tenses and for first-person, second-person and third-person forms.   

What is needed to know about this type of oath is to answer the following two questions: 1- What is its syntactic form and what are its components? 2- How does each of the syntactic components of this type of swearing change, and in what ways can it be plotted? In other words, in different practical situations, what structural changes might occur in conditional oath constructions to produce different forms of this type of oath? The nature of the conditional type of oath is best revealed when comparing the following examples, which expresses the same subject in both types of oath: The common construction of swearing:   *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article) • ‘I swear by my life that I will not break my covenant’ Conditional swearing: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article) • ‘Broken be my back and my soul! If I break my covenant’ The meaning of both sentences is the same, but the way they are expressed is syntactically different. In the conditional construction, the speaker considers breaking the covenant as a curse upon themselves to show that they do not break the covenant. In this syntactic construction of swearing, the dependent clause in which the subject of the oath is raised is not limited in terms of tense: it is used for any subject in all three present, past and future tenses: Present: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)• ‘May I be a base-born if I have any other mistake than this’ Past: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article) • ‘May my poetry be ill-gotten if I had written only a poem in my life except with the echo of your name’ Future: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)• ‘I would be worse than a dog if I run after bread/sustenance like a dog’ The main clause can be expressed in three forms: ‘declarative’, ‘imperative’ and ‘exclamatory’, each of which can be converted into other forms. The possibility of converting these forms into one another form implies that the speaker feels free to express a story with three different constructions according to the situation: Main clause in the form of a declarative sentence: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)• ‘I am ignoble if I go with a complain to a stranger’ Main clause in the form of an exclamatory sentence: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)• ‘If I have been contaminated by the wine so far, may God’s lawful be unlawful to me!’ Main clause in the form of an imperative sentence: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)
• ‘If this deed of mine is not true, make me die a Jew God’ Although the expression of an oath through the conditional construction is possible in all three grammatical persons, i.e. first, second and third person, in both ‘singular’ and ‘plural’ forms, it is widely used in the first person (singular and plural) and its meaning is clearer in this form. This type of oath is rarely used in the second or third persons, and its meaning is not very clear: First person singular: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)• ‘My house may be ruined if I have said such a thing’ First person plural: *(To view this part of the text, refer to the end of the pdf file in the main article)• ‘We are not human if we relinquish our right’   

The present paper illustrated that oath in Persian is not limited to the major common construction rather it has long been encoded through conditionals on special occasions. The conditional construction of swearing in Persian is used for any subject in all three tenses of the past, present, and future, with slight differences in the first-, second- and third-person forms. The main clause in this type of oath expression is always in negative form and can be expressed in declarative, imperative, or exclamatory forms. Rhetorically, this type of oath is used widely in situations where the speaker emphasizes the subject in question and tends to reassure the audience about the subject by removing any doubts. Uncommon abbreviations: SUBJ = subjunctive; DECL = declarative; EXCL = exclamatory; IMPE = imperative; PRS = present; PST = past; FUT = future; PL = plural; SG = single.