Abstract

The core of the Persian tense-aspect system revolves around two verbal stem forms and the so-called durative prefix mi-. We argue that Stem II encodes a perfective meaning, requiring that the event time is contained in the topic time, whereas the prefix mi- encodes that a viewpoint is temporally contained in the event time. Temporal operators, in turn, relate the viewpoint time and the topic time to the utterance time, thus relating the event time to the utterance time. At least one of these methods has to be applied in order to make the predication interpretable. These meanings are modeled within a framework of branching time, which captures facts about the completion or non-completion of events, and provides a novel way for modeling the future. We also treat the use of the prefix mi- in generic sentences and the complex tenses that are expressed with auxiliaries: the modal future, the progressive, and the perfect.

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