Denominative verbs in Zoroastrian Middle Persian texts (statistical and corpus-based analysis)

The construction of the verbs is based on two stems, past and present. The present stem is used to make present and imperative verbs, and the past stem, which is the ancient Iranian past participle, is used to make past tense verbs. In Persian grammar, such verbs are called main verbs. In Middle Persian, there is another type of verb construction, which is called denominative verbs. These verbs are constructed according to a certain rule and are common constructions in Pahlavi language. This research is aimed at statistical investigating of the use of different grammatical categories such as noun, adjective, preposition, adverb, pronoun, and prefix to create a denominative verb. This research tries to answer the following questions: which grammatical categories are used more frequently in the construction of denominative verbs; which conjugation has more frequency and in which Middle Persian texts occurs more often. The data is gathered from a corpus of 12 Pahlavi texts with 46,570 words. The results of the data analysis showed that most of the denominative verbs were constructed using noun and adjective, although these verbs were also made from other categories such as adverbs, prepositions, and pronouns. The transitive past tense is the most used construction in the texts, and is more frequent in the texts based on the Zend of Avesta, such as the Wizīdagīhā ī Zādsparam.