The periphrastic perfect of Old Persian revisited
Marc Bavant
Goal of the study
 Sort out the arguments about the voice of OP periphrastic
perfect
 Prototype: tya manā kartam (astiy)
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tya: relative pronoun neuter nominative
manā: genitive-dative of 1sg pronoun
kartam: passive past participle neuter nominative of karastiy: copula present 3sg
«what has been done by me» or «what I have done»
 This prototype has a parallel in Indic (Indo-Aryan)
languages
 It gave rise to ergativity in modern Indo-Iranian
p. 2
Typical standpoints about this perfect turn
 Pre-Benveniste scholars: this is a passive perfect turn
similar to Sanskrit mayā kṛtam asti or Latin a me factum
est, except that the agent is expressed in genitive
 Benveniste: this is an active perfect in the form of a
possessive turn
 Pirejko: this is a passive perfect in the form of possessive
turn
 Klaiman: this is an ergative turn (thus active in meaning)
 Haig: this is a non-passive perfect in the form of an exterior
possessor construction (EPC)
p. 3
Specificities of OP
 Small corpus
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~7000 words, ~1000 different word forms
Lacunae, restorations
Other language versions
 Uncertainties
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Graphic system
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Semantics of past tenses
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va-i-na-ta-i-ya = vainantiy or vainataiy?
tya manā kartam =? tya adam akunavam
Loose syntactic links
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VIII manā taumāyā tyaiy paruvam xšāyaθiyā āha
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[There were] 8 [persons] of my family who were kings before
I have 8 of the family who were kings before (EPC)
8 of my family of before were kings (Meillet)
8 of my family, those where kings before
p. 4
Typology of occurrences of the turn
 Only 42 occurrences of the periphrastic perfect of a
transitive verb with an expressed agent
 3 «frequent» types (with at least 5 occurrences)
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90% of all occurrences!
tya manā kartam, tya=maiy kartam
avaθā=šām hamaranam kartam
 10 «rare» types
 Characteristics
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Predicate: always a form of past participle karta
Copula: only 4 occurrences, 1 in imperfect
Agent: manā, -maiy, -šām + 3 marginal cases
Patient: tya, hamaranam + 3 marginal cases
p. 5
Voice arguments (1/10)
The participle is passive, so is the periphrastic turn too
 The OP ta- participle and the IE *to- verbal adjective
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The IE verbal adjective has not always a passive meaning
OP past participle for ~6 intransitive and ~20 transitive verbs
The OP pp from transitive verbs seems indeed to be passive
 «Это причастие пассивно и тем самым определяет залог
конструкции как пассивный» (Pirejko)
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She stands against Benveniste
She admits that later ergativization will change the orientation
 The argument is clearly false: at least the effect of the
auxiliary must be taken into account
p. 6
Voice arguments (2/10)
If manā kartam was passive, it would lack an active correlate:
so it is not passive
 There exists a synthetic passive in -ya (present tenses only)
 Skjærvø proposes a passive interpretation of the periphrastic
perfect if the agent is expressed, and an active one if it is not
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But what about the omission of the agent in a synthetic passive?
 Kent proposes that the active correlate to tya manā kartam
be tya adam akunavam (imperfect)
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But what about the synthetic passive imperfect akariya?
p. 7
Voice arguments (3/10)
The patient is «central», so the turn is passive
 This is the main argument according to Pirejko
 Centrality of the patient argument (O) defined by
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Position of this argument → false
Predicate agreement with it → debatable whether convincing
Optionality of the agent (A) → debatable whether convincing
p. 8
Voice arguments (4/10)
The patient is not in accusative, so the turn is passive
 Benveniste draws a parallel between the periphrastic
perfects of OP and Armenian
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In Armenian the patient is in accusative, an argument to exclude a
passive interpretation and reinforce the parallel with perfects in have
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«À date historique le parfait transitif a le comportement syntaxique
d’une forme simple transitive à l’égard de son objet»
It is tempting to reverse the argument and conclude that the OP
perfect is not transitive!
 However the patient could be in accusative in OP too!
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All vanilla agentive occurrences have a neuter patient
The only non neuter patient... is in accusative (in a faulty inscription)
Compare with quid tibi hanc curatiost rem ? (Plautus)
p. 9
Voice arguments (5/10)
The synthetic passive does not express its agent in genitive,
so the perfect turn is active
 Argument put forth by Benveniste
 hacā=ma aθahya «was ordered by me»
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hacā = Latin ab, -ma ablative clitic
But only two examples and «ordered from me» is acceptable!
 There are other agentive turns for the synthetic passive
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rādiy
Probably genitive too
utā=[š]ām Auramazdā [naiy ayadiya] Auramazdām ayadaiy
➢ [u]tā naiy Auramazdā[=šām] [aya]di[ya] Auramazdām ayadaiy
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 There is no reason why the agentive NP of a synthetic and a
periphrastic passive need to be identical!
p. 10
Voice arguments (6/10)
The agentive NP is less grammaticalized in a synthetic
passive than in the perfect turn, so the latter is active
 Indeed the agentive NP seems fluctuating in synthetic
passives, whereas the agent of a periphrastic perfect is
always in genitive
 Argument put forth by Haig who infers that the agent of the
perfect turn is a core argument (despite its optionality)
 Not everyone agrees that the agent is a core argument in
ergative languages
 Not everyone agrees that the agentive NP in a passive
clause is a peripheral argument
 There is no demonstrated equivalence between «core
argument» and «single marking»
p. 11
Voice arguments (7/10)
The A of a perfect turn is capable of controlling coreferential
deletion of S, so it is a subject and the turn is active
 Put forth by Haig
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ima tya manāi kartam pasāva yaθā Øi xšāyaθiya abavam
 It is easy to find that subject pronoun omission is used in OP!
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θātiy Dārayavauš xšāyaθiya [...] martiya hya āgariya āha avam
ubartam abaram hya arika āha avam ufrastam aparsam
θātiy Dārayavauš xšāyaθiya yadiy imām dipim vaināhy imaivā
patikarā naiydiš vikanāhy...
 If coreferential deletion is posited in this case, it must be
posited in other cases where the controller is not A!
p. 12
Voice arguments (8/10)
The agent of a perfect turn can be interpreted as a possessor
in an EPC, so the turn is active
 Das Blatt fiel auf seinen Kopf ~ Das Blatt fiel ihm auf den Kopf
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Other case: sa fille est malade ~ il a sa fille malade
Special meaning of affective implication of the possessor
 How to distinguish exterior/interior when dative=genitive?
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See Bulgarian, spoken French → word order, spurious pronoun
EPC does not exist in modern Iranian (König, Haspelmath 1998)
 Haig's theory : avaθā=šām hamaranam kartam
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Exaggerates the prevalence of EPC
What is the possessum?
 In the perfectivization process an EPC stage is possible
(without raising) but it gives no clue about the voice
p. 13
Voice arguments (9/10)
The agent of the perfect turn is maximally topical and
animate, so it is a subject and the turn is active
 Pragmatics is indeed the right field to distinguish between
active and passive
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Passive voice enables to topicalize the patient
The agent is usually 1sg or 3pl, so presumably topical
 But topicality presumption is not enough
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Sometimes 1sg seems focalized, not topicalized
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imam ustašanām aθaganām mām kartā
avaišām avā naiy astiy kartam yaθā manā kartam
In the prototype ima tya manā kartam, modern translations can use
active or passive indifferently, so the agent is not necessarily topical
 OP has another strategy to topicalize the patient:
«extraposition»
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martiya hya āgariya āha avam ubartam abaram
p. 14
Voice arguments (10/10)
Are there clues from other languages ?
 I do not agree with Skalmowski’s claim:
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“Both the Elamite and Akkadian translations offer an unequivocal
evidence for the active character of the OP periphrastic perfect”
 Babylonian (Akkadian)
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Does have a passive voice but non-agentive only
The agentive periphrastic perfect is translated as an active
 Achaemenid Elamite
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Has different ways for translating the OP perfect and imperfect
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But there is no 1-to-1 correspondance
The existence of an agentive passive in Elamite remains to prove
 Middle Persian
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The subject 1sg pronoun man is written LY (zevaresh)
What to conclude?
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man is still felt as a peripheral NP (Darmesteter), the turn is passive
The turn is ergative (Noda)
p. 15
Conclusion (1/2)
 No argument seems really convincing
 There are three stages in the development of the turn
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An intransitive possessive turn (with no orientation)
A periphrastic perfect (the stage of OP texts, dubious orientation)
An integrated past tense inside an unstable split ergative system
(active)
 Even in stage 2 the perfect had not necessarily integrated
the diathesis system, which was probably collapsing due to
other strategies to topicalize the patient
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martiya hya āgariya āha avam ubartam abaram
 The periphrastic perfect appears as a synonym both of
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The non-agentive passive imperfect
The active imperfect
p. 16
Conclusion (2/2)
 Further research directions
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Pragmatics and word order
More in depth comparison of different language versions of the
same texts regarding pragmatical strategies in a context of
multilingualism
Study of the transition between stages 2 and 3 in Indic languages
p. 17
Main references
 Benveniste,1952: La construction passive du parfait transitif
 Haig, 2008: Alignment change in Iranian languages: a construction grammar
approach
 Kent, 1950: Old Persian
 König & Haspelmath, 1998: Les constructions à possesseur externe dans les
langues de l’Europe
 Meillet, Benveniste, 1915: Grammaire du vieux perse
 Pirejko, 1968: Osnovnye voprosy èrgativnosti na materiale indoiranskix jazykov
p. 18