---

Given that language serves as a reflection of social concepts, and considering the significant roles of "hopelessness" and "hopefulness" within human society, this paper aims to investigate the rates of hopelessness and hopefulness, as well as their conceptualizations in the language of Persian stories from the 1970s to the 2010s. To achieve this aim, six bestselling story books from each decade have been selected as the corpus for this study. The rationale for choosing stories as the focus of this research lies in the dual role that they play: either as the reflection of social contexts or as constructs particular social environments. Both perspectives stress the critical importance of examining social concepts within these narratives. In the selected corpus, metaphors and linguistic constructions pertaining to hopelessness and hopefulness have been analyzed based on the framework established by Kövecses (2020) and the principles of Construction Grammar. The findings reveal that, upon comparing the token frequency of metaphors and linguistic constructions associated with hopelessness and hopefulness, there has been a sharp increase in the prevalence of hopelessness in Persian narratives over time; however, this trend has shown a slight decline in the 2000s. Furthermore, through an analysis of metaphorical mappings and construction schemas, it is evident that hopelessness in Persian stories is conceptualized through the notion of "inability", while hopefulness is articulated through concepts of "object" and "reliance on God".    
 

---

This paper identifies the grammatical constructions expressing indefiniteness in Old Persian. Based on the extant data from this stage of Persian language, There had been no indefinite article before Old Persian era and its grammaticalization is the result of the bridging context 'There is only one X, the X represents a human being'. In fact, the metonymic relations triggered reanalysis of "aiva" 'one' to an 'indefinite article' which in turn paved the way for its metaphoric extension. To explain this path of development, a Construction Grammar model is adopted. This research is based on the corpus of OP gathered by Kent (1953). The investigation illustrates that the token frequency of the aforementioned indefinite article in the total NPs (4130) amounts to 0.5%. This percentage is not much high; however, it implies that it is a newly formed grammatical construction in Old Persian. In other words, it illustrates the early stages of the indefinite article grammaticalization.  

1. Introduction
The terms "Definiteness" and "Indefiniteness" are usually applied to noun phrases (for example Abbott, 2004; 2006) and encoded using different linguistic means. The most common diachronic source for the indefinite marker in the languages of the world is the numeral 'one' (Givón, 1981; Lyons, 1999; Heine & Kuteva, 2002).
Only a minority of the languages of the world have grammaticalized indefinite markers (Heine, 1997:68). In other words, languages of the world tend to grammaticalize the "definite marker" prior to the "indefinite" one (Moravcsik, 1969; Croft, 2003). In Moravcsik's (1969) sample of 108 languages, in 61 languages (56%) only definite markers were identified, whereas 5 languages (5%) contained only indefinite markers and there was no information on the existence of the definite ones; Those 5 languages are Bambara, Gipsy, Rotuman, Sundanese, and Aztec. As a result Persian deserves studying in this regard. In this research, it is investigated whether the indefinite article existed in Old Persian grammar. If the response to this question is positive, the mechanism of its grammaticalization will be investigated. The data of this research are extracted from the corpus gathered by Kent (1953).  
 
2. Literature Review
The most related work in the related literature is the work of Paul (2008). Paul describes indefiniteness marking in three stages established for Persian language. His findings are represented as follows (figure 1) (Paul, 2008:310):
 
 
 

Figure 1 illustration of the history of -i and yek
 
In his study, there is no grammatical element expressing indefiniteness in Old Persian and little attention is paid to the contexts and mechanisms of this development. In contrary to Paul’s work, in this research it has been illustrated that in Old Persian the indefinite article is grammaticalized and a part of the grammar.
 
3. Methodology
In Construction Grammar, all levels of grammar involve constructions. By construction, we mean the pairing of form and meaning which are conventionalized (Hoffmann & Trousdale, 2011, p. 2). The constructions are not just listed but instead they form a structured inventory in the speakers' mind (Croft & Cruse, 2004, p. 262-265). Due to the structured inventory of constructions which form a network, in CG model there is no distinction between lexicon and syntax; therefore, all constructions can be located on a lexicon-syntax continuum (Fillmore, 1988). This allows for constructions to possess more or less lexical/grammatical characteristics. Consequently, no mere distinction between synchronic and diachronic phenomena is observable. In this process a change in the network of constructions is said to be observable in the course of time. In CG model, the process does not operate on a single word or morpheme but on the whole construction by syntagmatic relations (Lehmann, 1992, p. 406).
The reanalysis based on metonymic relations in the context of change which in turn paves the way for metaphoric extension results in grammaticalization (Davari & Naghzguy-Kohan, 2017), being a construction creation in CG. This model and its envisioned chain of changes can be summarized as follows:
(2) Metonymic relation > reanalysis > metaphoric relation > new construction > analogy
  In this research, the distribution of aiva ‘one’ is provided in diferent contexts. After that, the aforemtioned mechanism is investigated for the indefinite article in Old Persian. In adittion, the token frequency of the indefinite article is presented in the corpus.  
 
4. Results
The frequent use of aiva 'one' before human NPs in OP has triggered its reanalysis as 'indefinite article' in mytonymic relations. Here, one can observe a linkage between numeral system (one as a numeral) and "indefiniteness concept" as a more abstract conceptual space. This can be illustrated as figure (2):

1.                                                           B                                    

	Figure 2: the conceptual shift from the numeral to indefiniteness

 
 
 

The mentioned mechanisms are responsible for the emergence of the new grammatical category filling the determination slot; the schema is mentioned again as follows:
(1) [aiva[X]_NPi]_j                              [introducing a participant into discourse "a X"]_j, X=human
In spite of this usage of aiva as 'indefinite article', its token frequency is not much high in OP. in our corpus of 8077 words and 4130 NPs, there are 21 NPs containing indefinite articles. This can be illustrated in the following figure (3):
  
    Figure 3: The token frequency of indefinite article in the corpus
 
As it is obvious, the frequency of use (0.5%) of the indefinite article is not much high; however, as Denison (2006:290-291) notes, rare patterns of low frequency should be taken seriously.
 
5. Discussion
The presence of an indefinite article in the grammar entails the existence of a determination slot. Finding determinatives in a particular position (preceding modifiers) most of the time, speakers tend to regard that location as a place where determinatives occur and by the increase of the frequency, the speakers abstract a prehead pattern for determinatives (Sommerer, 2012:204-205). Following the establishment of the determinative slot, it turns into a 'gravitational pole' which attracts items (Krug, 2000). Actually, a syntactic slot is regarded as a position which invites linguistic elements to grammaticalize there. This is also true for the indefinite article in OP; the emergence of the determination slot triggered the grammaticalization of the indefinite article. Therefore, 'determination slot' and 'indefinite article' are inseparable notions.
 
6. Conclusion
In this research, the grammaticalization of the indefinite article in Old Persian is studied. The first bridging context which leads to the grammaticalization of indefinite article is the occurrence of numeral aiva 'one' before human NPs. In simple words, the context is 'There is only one X', here the X represents a human being. In this context, two readings of aiva are possible: a. there is one man, not more; b. the indefinite article reading, to introduce one person into discourse. In the latter reading the hearer reanalyzed aiva as an indefinite article based on metonymic relations. The reanalysis paves the way for the metaphoric extension from a numeral to a more grammaticalized item, namely an indefinite article. This conceptual shift/metaphoric extension becomes possible due to the fact that both 'numeral one' and 'indefinite article' mean 'one entity'. The difference is that the former means 'one' and the latter 'one out of the type'. The path of this grammaticalization is represented in (2):
(2) Numeral one   →    numeral one, indefinite article   →  indefinite article
 

---

This article studies semantic development of pronominal clitics in adnominal possessive constructions of New Persian (NP), i.e. 10th to 20th centuries. Although the structure of Persian possessive constructions has received attention in the previous literature, their semantic development is poorly noted. Since clitical possessors in adnominal constructions are not observed before NP, the investigation of their development will be beneficiary to understand semantic development of possession. A historical corpus of 500,000 words from prose texts of this period is investigated from which 1952 examples including clitical possessors are extracted. According to Heine (1977), Nikiforidou (1991), Koptjevskaja Tamm (2002), and Lehmann (2002), 21 meaning relations for possessive constructions with clitical possessors are introduced and the frequencies of each relation in the corpus and per century are represented. The diachronic investigation shows that the meaning relations are not distributed equally in various centuries but demonstrate a transfer from more concrete to more abstract relations. The body part and kinship relations are the most frequent which together with ownership are introduced as basic meanings of possessive constructions. Based on the semantic extension map of genitive structures introduced by Nikiforidou (1991), a map of semantic development of the above mentioned constructions is depicted with modifications. Moreover, the study shows that the third person singular and then first singular pronominal clitics have the most frequent usage in the corpus. In addition to contributing to understanding of semantic development of possession, the findings also represent linguistic criteria for stylistic analysis and dating of NP manuscripts.
1. Introduction
This article studies semantic development of pronominal clitics (PCs) as possessors of pertensive constructions in New Persian (NP). The structure of the adnominal possessive constructions in this language is pertensive, not genitive, since it is the head of the construction, the possessee, that is either marked by an ezafeh particle followed by a nominal or pronominal possessor, or marked by a clitical possessor. Since clitical possessors in adnominal constructions are not observed before NP, the investigation of their development during NP will be beneficiary to understand semantic development of possession.

2. Literature Review
In the previous literature, there are many studies trying to categorize different meaning relations represented by possessive constructions. However, there have been disagreements on which possessive relations depict basic meaning of possession and how different meanings are related to or derived from each other. Some consider ownership as basic meaning but others show that whole-part and/or kinship are more basic. Nikiforidou (1991) discusses that various meanings are derived based on metaphoric mapping and by studying European languages introduces a map of semantic extention for genitive structures which will be an starting point in our analysis. 

3. Methodology
Since the study is diachronic, the data are of written type and only the prose texts of NP period, 10th to 20th centuries, are studied. From each century, three manuscripts with different authors are selected. The corpus consists of about 500000 words, including 15000 words per manuscript, from which 1952 adnominal possessive constructions including clitical possessors are extracted. Their semantic relations are represented based on the descriptions in Heine (1977), Nikiforidou (1991), Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2002) and Lehmann (2002). The frequencies of the semantic relations per century in addition to their growth are demonstrated and a semantic map of their development is depicted based on the semantic extension map of genitive structures introduced by Nikiforidou (1991), but with modifications.

4. Results
The analyses show that the most frequent relations encoded by the possessive PCs in the whole corpus and per century are body-part and kinship relations, with 60% of the sample in total. The ownership relation includes only 5% of the data. All semantic relations show increase of usage through centuries and some are rare or recent. Figure (1) demonstrates frequencies of different semantic relations in total.

Figure 1.
Frequency of semantic relations in possessive constructions with clitical possessor
 

Moreover, a transfer from more concrete to more abstract concepts to be included in possessive relations is detected. This is more observable for the whole-part relation where the more abstract concepts of partitivity or quantification are not used sooner than 15th century (Fig 2).

Figure 2
Varieties of semantic relations with frequencies in whole-part constructions

This issue is also supported with the data showing that the 3sg PC has the most frequent usage, 70%, in the corpus and covers the most variety of the semantic relations. Figure 3 depicts frequencies of different person and number freatures of the PCs.