A psycholinguistic approach toward an instance of a language change: The case of -esh in Persian

In the spoken dialect of Tehrani in Persian, a new marker -esh optionally attaches to 3SG past verbs indexing the subject. While there is a claim that this marker has been borrowed from the Persian object clitic paradigm and grammaticalized as a new subject agreement marker to fill the gap in the agreement paradigm (Rasekh, 2011, 2017), it still has some properties different from other agreement markers such as being optional on verbs and blocking subsequent object clitics –two properties which point to its clitic origin. Through a set of experiments, this thesis is aimed at exploring how this marker is processed by native speakers and how results obtained from real-time implicit tasks (i.e., self-paced listening tasks and visual-world eye-tracking paradigm) are different from offline explicit tasks (i.e., acceptability judgement task and forced-choice task). The results of real-time implicit tasks show that (i) speakers process the new marker -esh as a grammatical marker and different from its object clitic counterpart, and (ii) in the ambiguous condition (i.e., when both subject and object are 3SG.SPEC), the new marker -esh is processed as an object clitic. The results of offline explicit tasks show that (i) -esh can equally index specific and non-specific subjects, which points to its agreement property because clitics must index only specific arguments in Persian but not to the extent that speakers prefer the new marker -esh over the standard version where no overt agreement marker attaches to the 3SG past verbs. These results confirm the initial hypothesis that the new marker -esh is a new subject agreement marker, but the process of grammaticalization is not complete yet and it has still some properties of its clitic counterpart and speakers still prefer to see the standard version of 3SG where there is no agreement when asked explicitly.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Graduate Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Nakhaei, Mahyar

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Storoshenko, Dennis Ryan

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Ritter, Elizabeth
• Jarvikivi, Juhani
• Ghomeshi, Jila
• Bratishenko, Elena

• Clitics
• Agreement markers
• Persian
• Psycholinguistics

Statement dc:rights

• University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/50590

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ucalgary.scholaris.ca:1880/122996