Search

In New Persian (hereafter NP) there are more than two dozen Arabic borrowings, attested in different dictionaries and partly still using today for the concept of "leader" [8], while most of the words for the same concept in Middle Persian (hereafter MP) are of Iranian origin. The present article introduces and examines the lexemes attested in Middle Persian and Arabic with the meaning "leader, leader, commander". The choice of the Middle Persian language is due to the task of showing the features of the public perception of the concept "leader" and its expressions at the linguistic extent in Sassanid Iran, still free from strong Arab influence. On the other hand, the choice of Arabic is due to the fact that it shows the enormous influence that the Arab world had already in the post-Sassanid period on the Iranians' perception of the concept of "leader", and, consequently, the Arabic language itself, in the level of linguistic thought, in the face of Arabic borrowings to denote the concept of "leader" in NP. The Arabic loanwords in NP, used for the concept of "leader", are presented in the authors' previous paper [8], because of which the present examination is limited in the presentation of the denotants of the concept of "leader" only in Sasanian Middle Persian and Arabic.

In this paper I adopt the tenets of historical pragmatics and make use of previous scholarly work on the adverbial particle up to present hypotheses on the existence in PDE and historical development of two intersubjective procedural meanings of the particle.One of these meanings is not in fact specific to up, but can be expressed by all particles in transitive phrasal verbs. It is encoded syntactically by the word-order adopted by the speaker for organizing verb, particle and object into a sequence.The other meaning I posit to have developed more recently and to be specific to up as a component part of a discourse verb, whether transitive or not. It is encoded morphologically by the form chosen by the speaker – compound with up vs. simplex.The linguistic relationship at stake in each case is not the same (it is the relation between phrasal verb and object for the first meaning, as opposed to the relation between verb and linguistic context for the second), but in both cases a variation in the form of the relation registers a variation in the speaker's attitude to the addressee.