Progressive Structures in English and Persian: A Comparative Grammaticalization Perspective

This thesis is a cross-linguistic comparison of grammaticalization in English and Persian, specifically examining changes related to progressive aspect constructions. Based on Hopper and Traugott (2003), Heine and Kuteva (2002), and Lehmann (1995 [1982]), the study shows how verbs such as be, have, dāštan, and gereftan grammaticalize as auxiliaries or aspectual markers through mechanisms of semantic bleaching, reanalysis, and structural bonding. Drawing on corpora such as COCA, BNC2014, ICE-GB, and the Bijankhan Corpus, the analysis reconstructs two typologically different but functionally equivalent grammaticalization paths in the two languages. The results contribute to our understanding of how grammatical meaning develops cross-linguistically and enrich current models of morphosyntactic change, constructionalization (Traugott & Trousdale, 2013), and typological convergence in aspectual systems.