ORIENTALIA SUECANA VOL. LIX (2010) Edited by ÉVA Á. CSATÓ JOAKIM ENWALL BO ISAKSSON CARINA JAHANI ANETTE MÅNSSON ANJU SAXENA CHRISTIANE SCHAEFER Guest editor: ÅKE VIBERG UPPSALA SWEDEN Orientalia Suecana LVI (2007) 2 FÖRF © 2010 by the individual authors Orientalia Suecana is an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal founded in 1952 and published annually by the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University. The journal, which is devoted to Indological, Iranian, Semitic, Sinological, and Turkic Studies aims to present current research relating to philological, linguistic, and literary topics. It contains articles, reviews, and review articles. Starting from vol. 59 (2010), Orientalia Suecana is a web-based only publication with open access. More information on http://www.lingfil.uu.se/orientalia Submissions for publication and books for review are welcome. Books will be re- viewed as circumstances permit. Publications received will not be returned. Manu- scripts, books for review, orders, and other correspondence concerning editorial matters should be sent to: Orientalia Suecana Editorial Board Department of Linguistics and Philology Uppsala University Box 635 SE-751 26 Uppsala Sweden E-mail: [email protected] ISSN 0078-6578 Typeset by Textgruppen i Uppsala AB Orientalia Suecana LVI (2007) TITEL 3 Contents Studies Abbas Ali Ahangar , A Study of the Verb System in the Sistani Dialect of Persian . 5 Karin Almbladh , The “ Basmala ” in Medieval Letters in Arabic Written by Jews and Christians . 45 Ablahad Lahdo , Text Sample from D ērīk (al-Malikiyah) . 61 Astrid Ottosson al-Bitar , Giving Voice to Silenced Stories in the Novel Kam ā yanbagh ī li-nahr [As is appropriate for a river] by Manhal al-Sarr āj 73 Lena Rydholm , Theories of Genre and Style in China in the Late 20 th Century 85 Impersonal constructions , ed. by Carina Jahani and Åke Viberg Åke Viberg , Impersonal Constructions – A Brief Introduction . 119 Åke Viberg , Swedish Impersonal Constructions from a Cross-linguistic Per- spective. An Exploratory Corpus-based Study . 122 Serge Axenov , Argument Structure and Impersonality in Avar . 159 Carina Jahani et al. , Impersonal Constructions in Balochi . 168 Guiti Shokri , Impersonal Constructions in Mazandarani . 182 Review Article Mahmoud Hassanabadi , One Epos and Some Ruckus: In Search of Lost Sources of the Sh āhn āme . 193 Book Reviews . 207 List of Contributors . 221 Orientalia Suecana LVI (2007) 4 FÖRF Orientalia Suecana LVI (2007) A Study of the Verb System in the Sistani Dialect of Persian 1 Abbas Ali Ahangar University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Iran Abstract 1 The Sistani dialect, though a dialect of Persian, displays its own manifestations of morpho-syntactic cate- gories on the verb form. The purpose of this article is to investigate the verb system of the Sistani dialect as spoken in Sistan based on linguistic fieldwork carried out in the village Sekuhe (locally known as Sakvâ ) and provide a synchronic description of its verb structure and the realization of verbal morpho-syntactic categories including agreement, tense, aspect, mood, and voice. The oral texts used as linguistic data, which compose the corpus for describing and analysing the given morpho-syntactic categories for verbs in the Sistani dialect, were extracted from the free speech of 10 males and 10 females between the ages of 7 and 85 with different social backgrounds living in Sekuhe. The findings of the present study show that the Sistani dialect employs what are basically its own morpho-syntactic elements to manifest agreement, tense, aspect, and voice in its verb system. 1. Introduction The Sistani dialect, a variety of Persian which belongs to the south-western group of Iranian languages (Windfuhr, 1989: 248, Bearman et al ., 2003: 427), is spoken in Sistan in northern Sistan and Baluchestan province in the southeast of the Islamic Republic of Iran; Farah and Nimruz provinces of Afghanistan; Sarakhs in Turkmen- istan; and in some regions of Iran including the town of Zahedan, Mazandaran prov- ince, Golestan province, and the towns of Mashhad and Sarakhs in the Razavi Kho- rasan province, where a great number of migrant native speakers of the Sistani dia- lect (henceforth SD) live. Whereas there are some works on aspects of the verb system of some varieties of SD spoken in Iran such as Zabol or the central region (e.g. Lazard, 1974; Moham- madi Khomak, 1379[2000]), Adimi (e.g. Dusti, 1380[2001]), Posht-e Ab (e.g. Oveisi, 1374[1995]), Shahraki-Narui and Miyankangi (e.g. Kadkhoda (1388[2010]), a comprehensive morpho-syntactic study of the verb system of this dialect as a whole has not yet been undertaken. This article is an attempt to investigate some sig- nificant morpho-syntactic categories of the verb system of SD as spoken in Sistan in northern Sistan and Baluchestan province in the southeast of Iran. 1 I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Prof. Donald Stilo, Prof. Carina Jahani, Dr. Agnes Korn, Dr. Serge Axenov, Dr. Erik Anonby, and Dr. Simin Karimi for their great contributions and useful comments during the preparation of this article. I also appreciate all the language consultants who greatly contributed to data collection, particularly Ali Jan Ahangar, Mohammad Hossein Ahangar, Hossein Ahangar, and Ali Khosravi. Orientalia Suecana LIX (2010) 6 ABBAS A LI A HANGAR The morpho-syntactic study of the verb system of SD includes agreement, tense, aspect, and mood as categories intrinsically associated with the verb as well as voice as a relational category. Though the author himself is a speaker of SD, the linguistic data have also been collected from the free speech of 10 male and 10 female lan- guage consultants between the ages of 7 and 85 with different social backgrounds living in the village of Sekuhe in the Shib-e Ab 2 region. Sekuhe is located 30 kilo- metres southwest of the town of Zabol in Sistan. The speech recorded consists of life stories, folktales and oral texts concerning wedding ceremonies, mourning cere- monies, cooking procedures, telling memories, etc. The oral texts extracted were phonologically transcribed and then the morpho-syntactic categories under investi- gation were studied and described. The phonemic inventory of SD consists of 22 consonants: p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ,3 f, v, s, z, š, ž, x, ɣ, č, ǰ, m, n, l, r, y; 11 simple vowels as shown below, and the diphthong ou (see also: Ahangar, 1382[2003]). 4 Table 1: Vowel phonemes in SD Front Central Back Close ī ū i u4 Close-mid ē ō Open-mid e o a Open ā â This article is composed of an introduction followed by two main sections and a con- clusion. Section 2 illustrates the verbal morpho-syntactic categories of the SD verb system as well as the way tense, aspect, and mood are realized in verb forms. Section 3 deals with the syntactic manifestation of voice as a relational category in this dialect. 2 Shib-e Ab is one of the five geographical regions of Sistan, namely: (1) Zabol or central region, (2) Miyankangi region, (3) Shahraki-Narui region, (4) Posht-e Ab region, and (5) Shib-e Ab region. 3 Since the status of the glottal stop / ʔ/ as a phoneme in initial position in SD as well as standard Persian is controversial (see also: Okati, 2008; Okati, Ahangar, and Jahani 2009), it will be omitted from the tran- scription in this article. 4 The author checked the short vowel u and the long vowel ū articulation with Prof. Donald Stilo, (at the Summer School workshop held at Kiel university, Germany, August, 2007), and also with Dr. Erik Anonby (during his visit to the Sistan and Baluchestan University, June, 2008); both considered them as back but close to central vowels. In fact, these vowels are phonologically high back vowels in the data from Sekuhe, although they are typically realized as high central vowels. Furthermore, Lazard (1974) identifies only one high back vowel u [ ū]. Barjasteh Delforuz (1375[1996]), Oveisi (1374[1995]), Omrani, (1375[1996]), Dusti (1380[2001]), and Ahangar (1382[2003]) have already considered them phonologi- cally as high back vowels, too. Of course, Okati (2008) and Okati, Ahangar, Jahani (2009) regard u pho- nologically as a central vowel in SD (the data are not from Sekuhe). Generally speaking, it seems that u in SD spoken in Iran is phonologically unstable. The author believes that phonological fronting of this vowel in Sistani varieties from back to central is a matter of degree and is subject to continuum. While it is back in some regions, it is close to central or central in other parts of Sistan. Orientalia Suecana LIX (2010) THE V ERB S YSTEM IN THE S ISTANI D IALECT OF P ERSIAN 7 2. Investigation of verbal morpho-syntactic categories of SD Tense, aspect, and mood (TAM), as the main inherent morpho-syntactic categories, are commonly manifested in the verbal inflection of languages (Haspelman, 2002; Tallerman, 2005; Katamba and Stonhom, 2006). Tense as the “grammaticalised expression of location in time” (Comrie, 1985:9) displays a deictic relation between the time of the predication, i.e., the event, state, process, or action referred to in the sentence/utterance and the speech time. Hence, tense expresses whether the predication is realized prior to (past tense), contempor- aneous with (present tense), or subsequent to (future tense) the speech time. Differ- ent languages make various tense distinctions. While some languages make a tripar- tite tense distinction including past, present, and future (e.g. Swahili), some make only a binary distinction between past and non-past (present-future) tenses (Ka- tamba and Stonham, 2006: 238). Languages may also distinguish absolute tense, taking the speech time as its deictic centre, from relative tense, taking another point in time than the speech time as its deictic centre (Comrie, 1985: 18–23).