Document Type : .
Authors
1
Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
2
Mahdieh Str., Haghgooyan Alley, Hamedan, Iran
Abstract
Discourse markers, as guides and integrators of discourse, are considered as important linguistic elements in the language system and their study is one of the important and new topics in linguistics. These linguistic units refer to words and phrases that alone have no meaning and no syntactic role, and their role in the sentence is usually to create a connection between the parts of speech and indicate the existence of a verbal relationship. These words, which are usually syntactically adverbs or connectors, play different roles in the language system. Since their main function is at the level of discourse (sequences of utterances) rather than at the level of utterances or sentences, discourse markers are relatively syntax-independent. In this study, contrastive, emphasizing and confirming functions of discourse markers have been considered. Therefore, The aim of this paper is the diachronic study of emergence of different functions of Persian word “Râsti”(truth), from old era to recent era. Since this research is inherently a documental and a corpus-based study, a corpus consisting of 22 written works related to the early period and 58 written works related to the late period has been selected. Based on the findings of the present study, the word “Râsti” in the earlier centuries was generally used as a noun, infinitive, adjective and adverb, but over time, through the pragmaticalization, it was transferred to initial place and changes to discourse marker. According to Schourup (1999) and Heine’s (2013) discourse marker’s features, the word “Râsti” has been proved to be a discourse marker. It was also found that the functions that the discourse marker “Râsti” accepts in Persian corresponded to the contrastive function presented by Noriko O Onodera (2004)) and to the semantic functions presented by Tragot (1982). On the other hand, it was found that the word “Râsti” is consistent with the emphasizing and confirming functions presented by Brinton (1996). Based on the findings of this study, the discourse marker “Râsti” had a higher frequency in its emphasizing role.
Keywords
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