Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD student in Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

2 Professor of Linguistics, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Abstract
All languages of the world have passive construction that behaves differently in the process of passive formation. One kind of passive construction observed in the world's languages is analytical that Iranian languages usually utilize it to construct passive construction. Pashai language, which is one of the Eastern Iranian languages, has an analytical passive construction. Keenan and Dreyer (2007) divided the auxiliary verbs of passive construction into four types. This article investigates the passive construction in Pashai language in terms of structure and lexicon. In Pashai language, the typical pattern for passive construction is similar to the pattern for the auxiliary verbs /biʈʃæ/ and bitek; the former is used for the feminine grammatical subject and the latter for the masculine grammatical subject and the direct object. It becomes a grammatical subject, the subject is lost or deleted, and the verb turns to past participle form. There is another pattern of passivization in Pashai language, which is examined in the second part of this article under the title of lexical and semantic passive; that is, the kind of passive construction in which the passivization process does not work regularly. The method used in this article is obvious and explicit; the text of Pashai language is not only written in their phonological forms but, to avoid problems analyzing the data, the examples are also translated into Persian.

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