Pashto Radical Simple Verbs and the Linguistic Border

Abstract

This article intends to focus on the concept of linguistic border in the verbal system of contemporary Pashto, an Iranian language mainly spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A careful, systematic, and detailed analysis of used radical simple verbs in different Pashto dialects draws attention to a certain degree of variation in one third of these verbs, which are switching from one category to another. Thanks to our research on Pashto verbs, we could identify four main trends of change, displaying as morphologic regularization, syntactic simplification, morphologic differentiation, and semantic clarification.