The past tense affix and its morphological-phonological Processes in Khansari from the perspective of Optimality Theory

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Literature and Foreign Languages

2 , Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba,i University

3 Faculty of literature and humanities, Isfahan university

Abstract

Khansari belongs to the central Iranian group of dialects spoken in the northwest of Isfahan province. Given its classification as Iran's endangered languages by international sources including the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, it is essential to document and thoroughly examine its linguistic features within an appropriate theoretical framework. This study reviews the previous phonological literature on this dialect, revises its consonant and vowel systems, and analyzes certain morphophonological alternations in the infinitive and past stem of verbs within the framework of Optimality Theory. The infinitive forms of 100 verbs, along with their inflected forms across different tenses, moods, aspects, persons, and numbers, were collected by consulting previous sources and through interviews with an educated native speaker. Collected data were transcribed, and the allomorphs of the verbal morphemes were identified. The past-tense morpheme in Khansari has two forms: /-t/ and /-ɑ/. A noteworthy point is that when the past stem is formed by adding /-ɑ/ to the present stem, the infinitive is not constructed by adding the infinitive suffix /-an/ to the past stem. The morpheme /-t/ appears in three phonetic variants [-t, -s, -d] in different phonological contexts. Constraint rankings are proposed for these three variants.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Persian Language and Iranian Dialects

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 09 September 2026

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