Post-predicate Elements in Iranian: Inheritance, Contact, and Information Structure
Funded by the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung
Funding period: 01.07.2019-30.06.2022
PI's: Geoffrey Haig (Bamberg); Mohammad Rasekh-Mahand (Hamedan)
Objectives
Iranian languages are routinely classified as "verb final". While this is true with regard to the position of (non-pronominal) direct objects, which are generally pre-verbal, in several West Iranian languages, certain other constituents occur more or less systematically after the verb. The result is a typologically unusual and hitherto largely ignored OVX word order type within West Iranian. Furthermore, OVX word order has been identified in unrelated languages in contact with Iranian, including Turkic, and Neo-Aramaic.
Click here for the position paper.
This project brings together leading international experts on Iranian and neighbouring languages in order to explore
- the extent of OVX word order within Iranian, and its genesis within the family
- the areal spread of OVX word order in neighbouring languages, and the pathways of transmission
- information-structural correlates of OVX word order
- typological implications of OVX word order.
The Word Order in Western Asia Corpus
Datasets from the project are successively uploaded to this website, where they are available for quantitative analysis. Data sets include minimally a spreadsheet with coded data and metadata; most data sets also include the source texts (e.g. as pdf) and sound files. The architecture of the corpus largely follows the design implemented in MultiCAST.
The HamBam Corpus (Hamedan-Bamberg Corpus of Contemporary Spoken Persian)
Workshop series
The associated scholars meet once a year for three years, with the aim of producing a multi-lingual survey of post-predicate structures across Iranian and neighbouring languages. Click here for the first workshop (Bamberg 6-7th September 2019)