On the syntax of the Persian classical narrative poetry. Constructions with a past participle in the Shāhnāme

This paper aims to describe a little studied syntactic construction of Early and Classical New Persian which involves dependent phrases or clauses with a verb in the form of a past participle. The examples are mainly taken from Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāme and texts of early poetry, where the construction is well-attested, but examples from early prose texts have also been given. This shows that the construction was not restricted to poetry. In the Shāhnāme and early texts, participial constructions are usually placed after a clause with a finite verb in the past tense. They are endowed with a series of syntactic and semantic functions, such as that of adnominal or adverbial modification through phrases or clauses, or predicative complement. Of these, only constructions with an adverbial value, mainly expressing time, but also manner, cause, and other relations, continue up to the present, though in a more rigid form: they are placed before the main clause, and have the value of a subordinate adverbial clause indicating anteriority to the action of the main clause (e.g. be khāne rafte, shām khwordam ‘when I went home, I had dinner’). At the end of the article, a hypothesis aimed at explaining the development of the construction from Early and Classical to Modern New Persian is put forward