Grammaticalization of Yæ'ni ('meaning') in Persian

Adopting a discourse-pragmatic approach, this study examines the process of grammaticalization of Persian discourse marker yæ'ni to develop a better understanding of the structural and semantic changes involved in the evolution of discourse/pragmatic markers as well as to help make some generalizations about the process of grammaticalization. It will investigate how yæ'ni, through the process of grammaticalization, exhibits different pragmatic functions to characterize changes involved in the evolution of a discourse/pragmatic marker. In a sense, its behavior in the ordinary Persian interactions reveals how desemanticization has taken place in favor of some new procedural-pragmatic meanings and functions relating to the discourse situation (i.e., metalinguistic, subjective, and intersubjective uses). The main argument of the paper will be that it is rather impossible to establish a single uni-linear course of semantic development, yet pragmatic meanings tend to arise through invited inferences. For the case of yæ'ni, it can be further argued that while its subjective meanings clearly precede its intersubjective uses, one cannot determine that its textual meanings precede its (inter)subjective meanings.