Beyond motion: ‘Come’ and ‘go’ in Persian oral narratives

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a discourse-analytic study of the verbs aamadan ‘come’ and raftan ‘go’ in Persian as they appear in thirty oral elicited narratives and uses English narratives based on identical stimuli as a reference point for a comparative analysis. The paper argues that despite certain similarities, the two sets of verbs in English and Persian have clear differences, both in terms of the syntactic structures in which they appear and their functions within the stories. Notably, beyond the expression of translational motion, aamadan and raftan encode aspect, subjectivity, and the speakers’ perspectives on certain elements of the events as the stories unfold in their memories. Such choices in grammatical structures of the narratives can reveal much about the speakers’ underlying cognitive processing and contribute to the understanding of the speakers’ conceptual image of the story line.