Aspectual Verb Constructions in Persian

This paper aims to describe and explain the different morphosyntactic and semantic features of some double verb constructions in Persian, an Indo-European language mainly spoken in Iran. It is argued that these double verb constructions are not instances of serial verb construction, but instances of emerging aspectual verbs with varied degrees of grammaticalization. It is argued that numerous factors lead to grammaticalization of these verbs, including context, the semantic class of the verbs, and their frequency. A corpus-based analysis shows that these aspectual verbs have been grammaticalized in different ratios during the last one hundred years, demonstrating ongoing change in the Persian language.