Investigating Tense and Aspect in Bakhtiari Dialect

The present study investigated the tense and aspect from morphological and phonological perspectives in the Bakhtiari dialect as a linguistic variety of the Persian language. This dialect is used in four provinces of Charmahal and Bakhtiari, Isfahan, Kohgiloye and Boyerahmad, and Khuzestan. The method of the study is descriptive which has been conducted through field study. Data were collected in Charmahal and Bakhtiari provinces and the north of Khuzestan province. About 10 hours of peoples' daily conversations were recorded and analyzed based on Katamba and Stonham (2007). Results showed that the future and past tenses of this dialect have attached auxiliary verbs of "be "pronounced as "bid", "vi" or "bi". The bound morpheme of /e/ is initially attached to the verb stem which shows no perfect aspect of this structure. Thus, the perfect aspect cannot be seen in this dialect; therefore, simple past or past perfect tense is used interchangeably. Past perfect aspects can be seen as a frequent structure in this dialect. The results of this study can help linguistics arrive at a complete picture of Bakhtiari's verbal constituents. It also may be a guide for investigating other Persian language dialects regarding their grammatical structures.