شناسه فعل نه ضمير متصل فاعلي است و نه نهاد اجباري

The Inflexional Suffix Appended to Verbs Is Neither the Verbʹs Subject Nor a Subject Pronoun

The subject of this paper is senase, which is appended to verbs in Persian when they are conjugated and it is usually translated into English as the "inflexional suffix". For instance in the conjugated verb raftam (=I went) the -am part is the aenase, which most traditional Iranian grammarians have been calling zamir-e mottasel-e fa`eli (the conjoined subject pronoun). Some grammarians have been calling it "the required subject of the verb" (in contradistinction to the "optional subject" that comes at the beginning of the sentence and may be optionally omitted). The author argues in this paper that this appended element, the senase, is neither the subject itself, nor a pronoun replacing it. He says senase is only an indicator of the `personʹ and the `numberʹ of the subject of the verb. For instance -am only indicates the subject of the verb is `first personʹ and `singularʹ. And he goes on to discuss where the subject of the verb may be safely omitted. And his conclusion in a nutshell: "The subject is a required part of the sentence; it is not an optional part. Also the verb by itself does not constitute a sentence."