Actions & Interactions

This book offers the first comprehensive description of directives in Persian, within the framework of Interactive Grammar (IG), aiming to categorize and analyze their diverse types. While IG furnishes valuable tools for examining interactives, its current architecture proves insufficient to accommodate the breadth of directives in different languages particularly English and Persian. To bridge this lacuna and augment IG’s cross-linguistic generalizability, this book posits a taxonomy that bifurcates directives into primary and secondary categories, with the latter further subdivided into imperative-derived, adverb-derived, vocative-derived, and nominal directives. A novel perspective is also offered on double-verb imperatives, particularly in Persian, challenging traditional interpretations of serial verb constructions to illuminate their unique features and functions. Methodologically, the study synthesizes pragmatic and phono-pragmatic analyses, interrogating the interplay of prosodic parameters (duration, f0, and intensity) with pragmatic functions. The multifunctional directive bebin (‘look’) serves as a paradigmatic case study. Empirical findings reveal a bidirectional interface between prosodic realization and pragmatic intent; wherein prosodic cues disambiguate functional interpretations while pragmatic motivations influence prosodic realizations. This book demonstrates the correlation between phonetic erosion and grammaticalization, with highly grammaticalized functions exhibiting systematic phonetic reduction. Theoretical implications are further drawn from the problematization of functional polysemy, where the study introduces social meaning as a third semiotic stratum emergent from dyadic interactional dynamics.