Aspects of Iranian Linguistics introduces readers to recent research into various properties of a number of Iranian languages. The volume consists of twenty chapters that cover a full range of Iranian linguistics, including formal theoretical perspectives (from a syntactic and morphological point of view), typological and functional perspectives, and diachronic and areal perspectives. It also contains papers on computational linguistics and neurolinguistics, as well as the modern history of lexicography in Iran. Various Iranian languages are discussed in this volume, including Hawrami and Kermanji, two of the major dialects of Kurdish, Medival, Classical and Modern Persian, Balochi, Taleshi and Pamir. With the exception of Persian, other Iranian languages had not received much attention in the past. Thus this work, as the first volume ever published on various aspects of these languages and their linguistic properties, is a valuable contribution to our understanding of a less commonly studied language family. The theoretical, descriptive, and applied approaches pursued by various authors in this volume, together with the colorful range of languages discussed, provide a unique perspective that is appealing to researchers in different domains of linguistics and language studies.
About the Author: Jon Dehdari is a Ph.D. student in linguistics at the Ohio State University. His general research interests include computational linguistics, syntax, morphology, formal languages, and typology. Lewis Gebhardt is completing his PhD dissertation at Northwestern University. His research focus is DP syntax and the semantics interface. Pending publications include Null D0s in Bare Plurals and Classifiers and Partitives in Persian. Saeed Ghaniabadi is a PhD student of linguistics at the University of Manitoba. His research focuses on Persian morphosyntax. His recent projects include mobile plural marking, Q- versus N-partitive constructions, and the empty noun construction in Persian. He has presented papers at international conferences. Jila Ghomeshi is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba. She is interested in syntax, the interface between syntax and morphology, pragmatics, and the nature of lexical representations. Recent projects have involved work on reduplication, number, determiners, and proper names. She works primarily on Persian and has published a number of articles in international journals. Geoffrey Haig is an assistant professor at the department of General Linguistics, Kiel University. He has published and edited a number of books and articles on Turkic and Iranian languages, field and documentary linguistics, areal linguistics, diachronic syntax, and Construction Grammar. Anders Holmberg is Professor in Theoretical Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK. His research interests are syntactic theory, comparative syntax, and descriptive linguistics. He is best known for his works on Scandinavian and Finnish syntax. He has (co-)authored several books and published widely, in Linguistic Inquiry, Studia Linguistica, NLLT, and other publications. He has also served as president of GLOW, the professional organization of generative linguistics in Europe. Carina Jahani is professor of Iranian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interests include New Iranian linguistics, particularly Balochi and Persian, as well as sociolinguistics and oral literature. She has published several books and articles on these and related subjects, among others her Ph.D. dissertation Standardization and Orthography in the Balochi Language and (together with Agnes Korn) The Baloch and their Neighbours. Simin Karimi is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on syntax, and the interface between syntax, semantics, morphology and discourse functions, with a special interest in Iranian linguistics. Her recent projects include complex predicates, scrambling, control, nominal constructions, and modality. She has published three books and several papers in major international journals. Gh. Karimi-Doostan is associate professor of linguistics at the University of Kurdistan, Iran. His research interests include argument structure, syntax-semantics interface and complex predicate, with a special interest in Iranian linguistics. He has published two books and several articles in major journals such as Lingua and Iranian language and linguistic journals. Gregory Key is a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Arizona. He is interested in the diachronic syntax and morphology of Persian and Turkish. This is his first publication. Agnes Korn is associate professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Frankfurt a.M. Her research interests include historical linguistics of Indic and Iranian, with a special focus on contemporary Western Iranian languages. She has published books and articles, specifically on the Balochi language, and co-edited a volume of conference proceedings. Deryle Lonsdale is associate professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He has worked in machine translation, natural language generation, and spoken language processing. His interests include computational linguistics, formal morphosyntax/semantics, data extraction, cognitive modeling of language use, and Salishan linguistics. Shahrzad Mahootian is professor of linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. Her research focus is on the structure and function of codeswitching, and aspects of Iranian linguistics. Her publications include a grammar of Persian (Routledge), and articles in Linguistic Inquiry, Elsevier's Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, and the International Journal of Bilingualism, among others. Reza Nilipour is professor of neurolinguistics and clinical linguistics at the University Rehabilitation Sciences in Tehran. He has published two books in English and several others in Persian. He is the author of many articles in Journals of Brain and Language, Neurolinguistics and Aphasiology. His current research interests are neurolinguistic evidence in adults and specific language impairment in Persian developing children. David Odden is professor of linguistics at Ohio State University. His primary research interests are language description and phonological theory. He is editor of Studies in African Linguistics, and recently published a textbok on phonological analysis. Daniel Paul is a linguistics Ph.D. student at Manchester University in England. He has a special interest in Iranian languages, and has conducted dialect research in Iran and Tajikistan. Ludwig Paul is professor of Iranian Studies at Hamburg University. His research interests focus on the History of Persian and on West Iranian dialectology (esp. Kurdish), but also include modern Iranian history. He has published a Grammar of Zazaki and several articles mainly on Iranian linguistics. He is presently working on a grammar of Early Judaeo-Persian. Vida Samiian is professor of linguistics at California State University, Fresno. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA, specializing in syntax and Iranian languages. Her research has been focused on the structure of non-verbal phrasal categories in Persian. She currently serves as Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at California State University, Fresno. Pollet Samvelian is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3. Her research focuses on syntax, morphology and Iranian languages. Her recent projects include complex predicates, the Ezafe construction in Iranian languages, pronominal clitics and agreement in Sorani Kurdish. Donald Stilo is a visiting Scientist in Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He was a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. His M.A. and Ph.D in Linguistics (concentration: Iranian languages) are from University of Michigan. He taught Persian language and Iranian linguistics for 20 years in the U.S. Azita Taleghani is instructor of Persian in the departments of Language Studies and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include morpho-syntax and syntax-semantics interface, with a special interest in Iranian linguistics. She is the co-author of a chapter, and her dissertation, entitled Modality, Aspect and Negation, will be published this year. Antje Wendtland works as a research assistant at the University of Goettingen. She teaches Eastern Middle Iranian languages (Sogdian, Bactrian, Khotanese, Choresmian). Her thesis dealt with the development of the definite article in Sogdian. She has published articles on Sogdian and the Pamir languages.