The functions and evolution of xob ‘well’ in Persian: A thetical analysis

Abstract

This study aims to explore the functions of the Persian xob ‘well’ and its evolution mechanisms. The Discourse Grammar model was mainly employed to analyze the occurrences of xob in the Bijankhān corpus. The data analysis revealed that xob is significantly frequent, especially in semi-formal and informal spoken genres. It also demonstrated that xob has risen from the adjective/adverb xub with several propositional meanings most of which converge on ‘good’. Having evolved from this meaning, the core procedural meaning of xob, i.e., ‘engaging in (positive) epistemic/affective consideration prefatory to continuation’, has developed metatextual functions in the three components of the situation of discourse. To express speaker's attitude and speaker-hearer interaction, xob mainly serves the functions of direct response (signaling acceptance, sufficiency, etc.), indirect response (signaling qualification, concession, etc.), and involvement prompting (signaling attention getting, backchannelling, and soliciting consensus). Meeting the needs of text organization, xob fulfills the dual purposes of framing the text pieces and transition between topics and events. The study also highlights the contribution of cooptation and late grammaticalization to the rise of the discourse markers xob and xeyli/besyār xob ‘very well’. Overall, these findings illustrate the potential of Discourse Grammar to address theticals such as discourse markers.