Past Participle in Persian: Containing Tense or Aspect?

In addition to grammatical and intrinsic aspects, aspectual readings may also arise from other factors like tense. Past Participles (PP) consist of the root of the verb and the suffix “-de/-te”. The suffix represents the anterior tense, which is the common semantic-grammatical core function found in all paradigms containing PP. Historical studies, on the other hand, show that PPs are originally made up of transitive verbs and their function has been to remove the subject from the argument structure of the verb and serve as the foreground of the object instead. They are well-known as “sefat maf’uli” (lit. accusative adjectives) and this arises from the fact that they participate in passive constructions and merely refer to the object of the underlying transitive verbs in some of their functions. The omission of the subject has made the transitive verbs similar to un-accusative ones in terms of their argument structure. For this reason, in addition to transitive verbs, PPs are derived from un-accusative verbs and analogically from the un-ergative ones. Removing the subject has another consequence too: The interaction of the anterior tense and subject omission has subsequently created an aspectual interpretation called “established stative”. There are two reasons why we consider this aspectual concept to be the fruit of the aforementioned features: First, when the underlying verb represents an event, creating an established stative interpretation requires the event to have taken place and secondly, in the absence of the subject, the actionality of the event decreases and subsequently makes the underlying verb (of any kind) stative because there is no actor left to do an action. In this way, the impossibility of deriving PPs from the verbs with the intrinsic aspects of “permanent inherent state” and “point state” can also be explained.